In my career I have attended a zillion conferences and met sales, technology and marketing people of all kinds. They are all in agreement about only one thing: no one knows what marketing is.

You'd think I would know. I majored in marketing in college and minored in computer science. But this had the result of making me virtually unemployable; these two disciplines seemed to have no intersection.

What marketing isn't

For some, marketing is everything that sales doesn’t want to do. To sales people, marketing is the source of coffee mugs, T-shirts and brochures, and also the originators of worthless leads. Sales people routinely say that marketing takes sales’ ideas and “makes them pretty.”

Maybe that’s why many salespeople use the title “marketing rep” instead of the more traditional “sleazy sales slug.” (One of the fun parts about being over 40 is that all the old jokes are new again. Here’s a classic: What’s the difference between a car salesperson and a computer salesperson? The car salesperson knows when he’s lying.)

To developers, “marketing” is how we create the need for their products. We continue to build products that people don’t need. We sit in a conference room and discuss new technologies that we want to work on. Then someone comes up with a cool idea, and the group agrees to build it. We give it to our salespeople who cannot sell it. Solution: blame marketing. Marketing must come up with a campaign that will make people want the product. I call this “perfuming the pig.” Yet no amount of perfume can overcome the stench of a product no one wants to buy.

What about finance? They just see marketing as a huge sinkhole of money. In their view, marketing relies on visions to come up with forecasts. We sit in a dark room, take off all of our clothes, drop some acid and await a “vision” that reveals a number. And too often, this is as accurate a description as any of our budgeting and revenue forecasting. As a discipline, we seem to like the number “3.” Next year, we’ll need $3 million to launch the product—or maybe it’s 3% of our corporate budget. Or maybe, if we launch it well, we can expect $3 million in revenue. Or maybe that’s 3 million new customers. Or is it 3% of the market? Really, we know the key number is 3. We’re just not sure of what we’re measuring.

The executives of most software companies typically come from sales, technology or finance and so bring this baggage to senior executive meetings. No wonder marketing is held in such low esteem at the executive table.

What is marketing?

Technology vendors have relegated marketing to marketing communications. And so it seems do the marketing people themselves. I rarely hear a marketing person talk about market problems and business opportunities; instead, I only hear them discuss marketing programs: the number of leads, the latest trendy jargon (“ROI is so hot this year.”) and their difficulty getting respect from others in their company.

The sad fact is that even marketing people cannot seem to agree on the definition of marketing. To those with MBAs, marketing means the same as business. That is, marketing is finding an unsolved problem, solving it and communicating the result to a well-defined market segment. Despite this classical definition, the typical marketer rarely talks about solving problems.

What is marcom?

Marketing communications (marcom) is responsible for executing marketing strategies to get the sales channel to “push” the product and to get customers to “pull” the product. Marcom uses various programs to accomplish this end: tchotchkes, brochures, tradeshows, advertising, public relations. In most cases, marcom is focused on execution rather than on content, relying on others for descriptions of the product and the text needed for documents. Marcom merely takes documents from others and then applies the corporate template. Marketing staff delete words they don’t understand, add technology buzzwords that end in “----ble” (such as scalable, extensible, and flexible) plus the “in” words (“lower TCO,” “increased ROI”).

Here’s the problem. In order to work at a company, you need to know what the company does.

I was so impressed years ago when I learned that Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s, would visit franchises and put on an apron to help with a rush of customers. Can you imagine marketing doing this? For that matter, can you imagine your executives doing it?

Perhaps it’s the MBA programs, perhaps it’s just folklore, but we seem to think that good marketers and good managers can do their jobs well without knowing the details of their products. This thinking is wrong. Anyone who has been in technology for a few years has a story about the consumer marketer who lasted only nine months. We hired the new VP; he changed our logo and corporate PowerPoint template; he stopped all lead generation and started advertising; he spent less on brochures and more on tchotchkes; he put all product information online for the customer to print.

And revenue tanked.

So we fire the new golden boy and turn marketing back over to the VP of Sales. To the consumer marketer dabbling in technology, we say, “Thanks for ruining what little credibility we had.” A consumer marketer in a technology company is like doorknob earrings—they seem like a good idea until you actually try to use them.

The new role: Product marketing

For years, product management has been attempting to facilitate the marketing effort despite marcom’s unerring ability to screw it up. But over the years, product management has become increasingly technical and more feature based, until some product managers have defected to marcom. But rather than stain their reputations and resumes with the phrase “marketing communications” (which translates “Please pay me less than everyone else.”), product management in a marketing role has created product marketing.

Here’s an example: A product expert delivered a positioning document and had a short conversation with a product marketing person. The next day, product marketing delivered a complete presentation including presenter notes. Since the product was UNIX related, the product marketing manager knew that industry trends of the adoption of UNIX as a production platform might be needed. So she accessed her IDC account, downloaded a table of UNIX adoption trends and forecasts, and pasted the result into PowerPoint.

Clearly, this is more than marcom ever did or can do.

What is marketing? Marketing’s chief role is to identify and quantify a business opportunity and then deliver the resulting product to a well-defined market segment. In technology, we use product management to apply technology savvy and market research to identify opportunities. Then product marketing uses technology savvy and marketing programs to deliver the product to market. And marcom makes it pretty.

What is marketing? It’s not T-shirts and tchotchkes. It’s not tradeshows and lead generation. It’s not even advertising and branding. These are all marketing programs.

Marketing finds and quantifies problems, facilitates the development of a solution and then creates a go-to-market plan that ensures product success.

What are your marketing people doing? Is it product marketing or merely marcom?

Steve Johnson, an expert in technology product management, has been working within the high-technology arena since 1981.  His experience includes technical, sales and marketing management positions at companies specializing in enterprise and desktop hardware and software.  He’s an instructor for Pragmatic Marketing® teaching courses such as “Practical Product Management™” and “Requirements That Work™.” Steve has trained thousands of marketing professionals at hundreds of technology companies in the United States and around the world.  You can contact Steve at sjohnson@pragmaticmarketing.com.