Is Marketing A Bad Word

Last week, my twin children turned 22.

I’m still Dad, but my hardest parenting work is behind me (I think/hope).

That got me thinking about parenting lessons learned. Here’s a big one:

When the kid does something bad, that doesn’t mean the kid is a bad person.

As parents, we need to help our kids understand the distinction.

“I’m not saying you’re bad. I’m saying you behaved badly.”

I thought of this lesson earlier today while meeting with a person responsible for marketing her business.

Her boss doesn’t want her to call it “marketing.”

He calls it “strategic communications.”

The boss has seen lots of bad marketing. He’s seen marketers behave badly.

They indiscriminately pitch without assessing need. They fill your inbox with content that offers little or no value. They use dirty tricks to persuade prospects to buy unneeded products.

From the boss’s perspective, “marketing” is a dirty business.

He’s onto something when he calls it “strategic communications.”

The marketer with whom I met explained the boss’s vision: He wants a deliberate, strategic, value-generating exchange between his company and individual prospects.

Funny, I said. That’s exactly what we recommend when we offer marketing tips.

Develop strategies to discover what’s relevant to your prospects. What do they want and need? How can you provide value?

Send content that includes interesting, informative, valuable information, not just product pitches. Don’t resort to a constant flow of just product pitches.

So to those marketers who do it the other way, the dirty way, I’m not saying you and “marketing” are bad. I’m saying you behaved badly.

Well-behaved marketers are strategic communicators. Good strategic communications is good marketing.