reality: everyone is in marketing

It's more than fact sheets, and working trade shows, and journal ads.

It's more than getting your search keywords right, or writing case studies, or schwag.

At its heart, marketing is about humility: about listening first and talking later, about admitting failure and trying again, about finding problems that people will pay (in one way or another) to fix.

Which is why everyone is in marketing.

Except. . .not everyone can write clearly. Or make a compelling, succinct argument. Or weave a story. Or segment markets. Or work with the press and analysts. Or stand up in front of crowds and not talk to their slides. Or distill hundreds of features and benefits to a single, crystalline point of value that someone can look at and say yes, that's me. That's OK. They don't have to be. Someone needs to write code, balance books, keep the servers running. Marketing sure can't do those things.

But everyone involved in an enterprise focused on the creation of products that purport to solve problems needs to think of themselves as solvers of customers' problems, with the ultimate goal of holding a solution up and asking "what do you think?"

Everyone is in marketing. But not everyone can do marketing.

And that's OK too.

Because it's our job as marketers to make sure that we bring everyone along with us so they can see for themselves the wonder in customers' eyes when we get it right, and the vacant disappointment when we get it wrong.

When we bring everyone into marketing with us, we all begin to share the same sense of urgency to get it right.

And that's when everything starts to work.