YCDBSOYA

Is "Marketing" a Science, an Art or a Skill? I ask because there still seems to be as many definitions of the activity as there are practitioners. Have a look at Wikipedia and you'll see what I mean. It's a question that often comes up regularly at conferences and reams of paper have been covered with opinions and explanations. Not surprising really, after all, in the scheme of things it's a relatively new discipline. In fact I can't trace the word, as we use and understand it, being in common use before the nineteen-sixties. I wonder who the very first marketing director was? He must have been a bit special and so must the company that appointed him. Now of course the activity is so important that it is widely regarded as a science and features strongly on the subject lists of most universities. 

My first job was that of post boy in a major firm of exporters in the City of London. I sorted and delivered the post to the various departments. There wasn't a marketing department. Next as an assistant to the export manager of a national company in the plastics industry, itself a new industry, I was in constant contact with all other areas of the business. Again there was no marketing department.

 I eventually became a trainee salesman for a firm that made and sold ribbons for typewriters, carbon papers and other office equipment, all of high quality, high price and high volume. There every director had been a salesman and had sold the company's products, no one was ever brought in from outside to fill a senior position without first spending some time as a salesman.  On joining you were required to spend two weeks at the factory learning about the products, how they were made etc, then you were required to learn by heart an entire book of sales talks, complete with the ‘turn-downs’ you would encounter.

At the end of the course everyone had to make a sales pitch to the moderator. If you were adjudged to have won an order, you kept the job. If you didn’t, you were out! Successful, you were sent to one of the hundreds of branch offices across the country and given a territory. Start time was 8 o'clock in the morning, finish at six. You were forbidden to use a car, even if you had one, every representative was required to wear a hat. You were expected to make at least thirty calls in a day if you were in a town, rather less in country areas. Each territory was graded and you were required to return the level of turnover the territory was thought capable of producing. A report on every call was required and would be discussed with the Branch Manager on your return to the branch office in the evening. No first names were allowed; the manager was the King. This company rarely advertised and the word marketing was never mentioned. They knew their market intimately and were the brand leader for years.

From this experience I took a number of major principles that have guided me ever since. The first was, never try to sell something I didn't believe in, and to always know and thoroughly understand whatever it was I was selling. The second, listen to people who know, especially those who have done it. Another, the more calls I made the more orders I got…and I was on commission.

I saw a couple of ads on the telly recently, one for Sainsbury and the other for Marks and Spencer. Both referred back to the foresight and wisdom of their respective founders. There are other such icons in the business world that still carry the name of the founder; Harrods, Selfridges, Ford, you know them all and many others too. Those founding fathers all worked long hours and used every means at their disposal to sell their goods and services; I bet none of those people would have recognised the term "Marketing". Selling? Now that's different, they all knew all about selling. I can't help wondering if those who created and built such successful organisations, unknowingly invented the concept of marketing but were too busy doing things to give it a name! They used the tools available to them at the time but added to them instinct and conviction rather than quantified research. Some famous names have of course gone from the scene, but they left footprints and lessons that modern business must learn from.

Now markets are bigger, more complex and are served by globally structured companies with vast resources at their disposal to research, understand and serve their target markets. To them the science of marketing is indispensable, but I am sure there are still a whole lot of people doing what the old greats did, creating new products and services and finding new ways to serve new markets. The internet presents opportunities to everyone to reach huge numbers of people across the world and even the smallest company or individual can now have an inexpensive website from which to sing their song (check out CariadBusinessWeb). All that is required is imagination, advice from the right people, and sheer hard work. 

So what has all this to do with the title of this piece? I'll tell you. The letters are on a tie clip given to me by the founder of Tesco, Sir John Cohen. As he handed it to me he said. "When business isn't so good, look at the tie clip and remember. You Can't Do Business Sitting On Your Arse." You don't need a marketing dinosaur or anyone else to tell you, that advice is still as good today as it was then.