MBA Boot Camp: What Marketing Actually Is (4.1)
Concepts & Vocabulary
Marketing (AMA Definition): The activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Needs vs. Wants: A need is a state of felt deprivation (e.g., I am thirsty). A want is the specific form that need takes, shaped by culture and personality (e.g., I want a Diet Coke). Marketing cannot create needs, but it heavily influences wants.
Value Exchange: The core transaction of marketing. The customer gives up something of value (money, time, data) in exchange for something they value more (a product, a service, a feeling).
Core Lesson: The Drucker Philosophy
Legendary management consultant Peter Drucker famously said: "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself."
Marketing is not sales. Sales is trying to get rid of what you have. Marketing is figuring out what to create in the first place.
Real marketing happens long before an advertisement is created. It starts with market research (identifying a gap or a need in the market). Then, marketing works with Operations to design the product, with Finance to price it, and finally creates the promotional campaign to tell the world about it. If the marketing strategy is perfect, the sales team barely has to work.
Application & Reflection
My job as Library Director at Lodi Public Library helped me to see that I liked marketing and was good at it. I focused a lot on developing a collection, services, and programs that I thought the community would like. Data informed the decisions, particularly around collection development and programming. People really liked animal programs we booked, so we looked for more animal programs to book. When prize winners selected items from the vault, the LEGO sets were often the first thing to go, so we got more LEGO sets the next year. I paid attention to what books were taken from the vault and bought more books like what was selected most. The adult workshops received excellent feedback, so we developed plans for more workshops, while also not overbooking the ones that worked (e.g. candlemaking workshop) so there was still a sense of scarcity.
Sometimes the inspiration came from being in the world, noticing something fun and interesting, and applying it to the library. I’d been in festival enviroments, and I thought it would be popular to develop something like that for the library. So we booked a climbing wall, a face painting station, a caricaturist, and carnival games. That became the kickoff carnival. Libraries could make events like that even bigger. Hire a walking magician! Dunk tank. I looked at booking these circus performers from Appleton, who use fire in their act.
Sometimes the ideas were developed from a marketing phrase that came to me. Board books are such a fun gift to give to a new mother, so I thought of the slogan: “A bundle of books for your bundle of joy.” And that was the start of the Baby Bundle idea, where we gave 5 board books in a basket to new babies born in the community. It became a really fun and heartwarming outreach effort. And those babies then start to come to story time. So the benefits of these kind of efforts grow the overall brand.
