Marketing: a failed experiment

You'd be hard pressed to find two better marketers than Steve Jobs and Seth Godin. But the reason for their success is remarkably simple. They don't focus on marketing, on creating "an integrated communications-based process through which individuals and communities discover that existing and newly-identified needs and wants may be satisfied by the products and services of others - Wikipedia". Instead they focus on selling.

A fantastic example of this is the state of the christian religions in the early 15th century. For thousands of years the church had been marketing religion. They told people what it was, how to do it and why it was important in to them. Then Martin Luther changed everything. His nailing 95 Theses to a church door kicked off one of the most important religious changes in history, the Protestant Reformation. He changed the face of religion because rather than market it to the people he put it in their hands, he sold it.

Jobs and Godin do the same thing. Jobs doesn't tell you why you'd want a mac or an iPod, he doesn't even tell you why it would make your life better. Jobs tells you what it is and lets you figure out why you want it. Seth doesn't give his perspective on marketing he sells a way of thinking about products and customers. When they speak they don't focus touch points or demographics, they don't rely on gimmicks or humor, they just sell.

If you find you're faced with a marketing decision don't fall for the hype, pick the one that sells.

Protecting a money stream

Forgive me for channeling Seth Godin for a moment.

Too often a company goes broke trying to protect their revenue stream. Once a company has found a source of income they become almost single minded in their focus on retaining it.

No one ever won a war trying to protect the land they'd captured.

And so it goes for revenue. If your company is going to survive it's going to have to continually find new products, new customers and new sources of revenue because eventually the conditions that got you where you are will go away.

At the moment the shining example of this is eBay, and it doesn't help that they didn't deserve much of their revenue stream in the first place.

eBay built their empire by courting two types of sellers, those that sold whatever they could find and those with a regular product source. Initially those sellers with a product source were simply happy to have a place to sell online, but as new opportunities (Yahoo Stores, Amazon, etc) arose it wasn't worth it to stick with eBay because of the yard sale sellers. Was it going to go any other way?

As a response to losing sellers eBay introduced new features without addressing the reputation of their sellers. So began their death spiral. Rather than innovating and looking for new revenue sources they focused on protecting the one they had, even if it never really wanted to be on eBay.

eBay isn't dead of course, but they've had to take drastic measures to maintain their revenue. They're still losing sellers and only recently started thinking outside the box but for many it's too little to late.