Marketing: Colin Gordon

COLIN GORDON

marketing expert

F o c u s e d t h i n k i n g

To be effective, marketing needs to take a broader view of the business and the marketplace, instead of a narrow ‘comms’ role. Here, Colin Gordon outlines the solution: focus on a small number of items with the power to truly change your course

A monument to Adam Smith stands outside St Giles’ Cathedral in The Royal Mile, Edinburgh

There’s nothing new in this marketing thing! Marketing is, at its simplest, the matching of demand to supply. I’ve always thought that sometimes we overthink and overwork our view of business and particularly marketing. We forget that we as businesspeople are meant to match an identified customer with a product or service that they might want. Demand and supply!

This is not new. Without demand there is no business – it’s all about consumption. As far back as Adam Smith in his seminal book The Wealth of Nations (written in 1776, i.e., nearly 250 years ago) the same idea was being talked about. “Consumption is the sole end…of all production,” and, Smith goes on to say, the only thing a producer should be worried about is whether such worry will help the interest of the consumer.

Original marketeers

What we now call marketing was being practiced by such businessmen as Wedgwood (of the pottery fame) and Faberge (of the jewellery brand fame) – they knew about the primacy of consumption and the match of demand to supply. They created a demand and invented supply systems. Josiah Wedgwood was the first producer to introduce mass production-line

What we now call marketing was being practiced by such businessmen as Wedgwood (of the pottery fame) and Faberge (of the jewellery brand fame) –they knew about the primacy of consumption and the match of demand to supply.

techniques to help quality and increase output – not Henry Ford who brought the same ideas to car manufacturing. They were the original marketeers as we would now class them. And these potters and jewellers and furniture makers and travel companies (Thomas Cook in 1808) did it without having the luxury (distraction?) of overly complicated communication systems, media platforms and consumer behaviour analysis. Rather, they relied on knowing how to promote and to invent to meet demands; they created demand; they invented supply (producer) systems.

Matching supply and demand was undoubtedly easier in a ‘less complicated’ or complex world. The sheer number of choices of everything available, the number of geographical markets, outlets, consumers, media, regulators, product formats, recipes, and so on, make today’s business world all the more complicated.

However, marketing should not