Marketing Is Everything

Yanyue(Vicki) Wu

Bus 103

Section 23

Oct15, 2013

Regis, Mckenna.  Marketing is Everything.

After 1990s, technology has become an essential tool for marketing; therefore, successful business adopts the new ways of marketing. Regis McKenna emphasizes the knowledge and experience marketing strategy, which result in the success of an overall marketing organization. Mckenna argues that knowledge and experience based marketing is the new marketing paradigm, and the knowledge marketing focus on using the new technology to introduce and sell the products. On the other side, the experience marketing creates the relationship with customers through “interactivity, connectivity, and creativity”.  He uses many examples to support his arguments throughout the article.

Mckenna states that “Marketing’s transformation is driven by the enormous power and the ubiquitous spread of technology”. From his statement, we understand that the importance technology plays in today’s business. His claim is strong because he uses many specific examples to support his statement. For example, twenty years ago, IBM was the major computer produce company, and the company did not have many competitors. However, today there is almost 300 semiconductors in the United States alone. These are IBM’s the new competitors, and they will bring in the new strategies and products. Also, there are new customer too. “These new customers don’t know about the old rules, the old understandings, or the old ways of doing business—and they don’t care. What they do care about is a company that is willing to adapt its products or services to fit their strategies”. Thus, the companies have to learne the new technology in order to compete with the market since the old way of marketing does not work anymore because other competitors could always introduce new strategies and products.

As the technology changes, customers have a variety of options when purchasing products. Therefore, nowadays, many companies’ marketing strategy have become customer driven. They focus on customer need first before selling the product just like Mckenna says that new marketing means “finds a way to integrate the customer into the company, to create and sustain a relationship between the company and the customer”.  I agree with Mckenna’s statement because marketing is not about selling the products; marketing is to create a relationship with the customers and retain them in the future. The knowledge marketing requires the business to adopt new technology, integrates customer needs and market demand, creates relationship with vendors and supplies.

Mckenna also mentions about the SWOT analysis. He says that “to some marketers, the creation of almost unlimited customer choice represents a threat—particularly when choice is accompanied by new competitors”. The example of Tide vs. Procter & Gamble shows that when customers have more choices, and these choices might become a threat to the marketer. For example, Tide served the entire market before Procter&Gambel introduced variety of Tide such as : “Unscented Tide and Liquid Tide in 1984, Tide with Bleach in 1988, and the concentrated Ultra Tide in 1990”. Procter&Gambel’s different choices became a threat to Tide because they only have one product to compete with Peocter& Gambel. Hence, the Tide company has to transfer into a knowledge base marketing because Tide needs to understand their competitors first and finds the customer need to adjust this situation.

In addition to the knowledge based marketing, experience marketing helps the businesses to create and attain customers, where they interact with customers to find out what customer are expecting from them. Mckenna compares how Gluco and Pumpco Company handled similar customer telephone calls when the customers were asking replacement of the equipment. The Gluco Company sent a replacement of the new instrument back to the customer and no questions being asked. The instruction for sending the broken item back are inside the box with shipping labels, and even the tape was inside. Imagine, if you are the customer, will you be appreciating with the Gluco company because they trust the customer, and take consumers convenience into consideration. However, Pumpco handled the order exchange differently, they did not give customer clearly instruction about sending the item back, and they would collect 15 dollars for the replacement. If one is Pumpco’s consumer, he or she probably will angry about this because they just pay to receive a broken item and still need to pay 15 dollars for the replacement. We can clearly see the difference of how these two companies handle their customer return issues. The company who focuses the customer concerns as their priority will win the market in a long run because they are collecting the customer loyalty.