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Showing posts from April, 2011

Lessons from dog food - if you're not doing segmentation, you're not doing marketing

What does "marketing" mean? My guess is that you'd get a lot of different answers to that question. Marketing is something we think we understand from general knowledge and from being the target of so much of it in our daily lives. We hardly need to have it explained to us. How true is that? Once, while working for a previous employer, I was asked to conclude a contract with Cranfield University, to enable 20 members of the Marketing department to attend a two week residential course on strategic marketing. Somehow, in return for my help, I managed to extract a promise that I could attend the course.  I wouldn't pretend for a minute that a two week course taught me marketing, but it did teach me that marketing is a serious discipline which has become highly professionalized and that there is much more to it than we experience as consumers.  A large proportion of the course I took at Cranfield was based on the work of Professor Malcolm McDonald. You can read about th