"Marketing Is Not A Department.

Marketing is a combination of elements that creates the environment in which it is possible to meet a customer need (starting right back at product development). It operates online and off and should inform and occupy every aspect and department of an organisation. More than ever before, it is everybody's job."

So Marketing is not dead – everything is marketing!

You have just added to a powderkeg of a post. Always delightfully provocative stuff from "This Blog Sits At The…". I'll state upfront that I disdain the "marketing" status quo, it is well on the road to late maturity/irrelevancy – in that respect, I am more an advocate of the things discussed in your post. Here's the "but" sandwich :

1) whether it's self-aggrandizing, headline stealing or lazy, I find it's just way too easy to strip down something, particularly when nothing is served up in return. Apple may have hated Microsoft and been the anti-Gates brand, they've succeeded by offering something brilliant as an response, not just more angst. PSFK may have received great press for their event by their pronouncement, I don't think its advanced the discussion forward. The reality is what marketing should be doing (the conscience of the customer, spearheading innovation, tapping market insight, generating and incubating an audience and community, encouraging engagement and participation, building value into products) has great value and I don't see a function waiting to pick up the slack. Get rid of this admittedly hollowed out function and you're left with sales and operations and a very transaction-driven climate.

As anybody who has launched a brand,product or service, it takes awhile to build something new up. Why don't we work with what's there and evolve it? Let's remember Cluetrain is almost a decade old and the revolution in corporate land hasn't happened yet, instead of the bluster, perhaps a Trojan Horse appraoch might work better and raise all ships.

2) Although we might like to consider a nirvana world where people
don't consume things, they do. With all of its negative connotations, tracking how people consume things is necessary. The missing is we don't nearly put the same amount of energy and investment behind how people use things, buy things, create things, author content about things, evangelize about things, collaborate on things, produce insights behind things, rally behind/support things…we've identified about 10 roles a citizen can function with and for an organization and consuming things is one of them …. we can change the words but they still do it, and time might be better spent convincing marketers of spending time on their other valuable roles than suggesting that this one doesn't exist.

3) What we need here is "detente" – the harder the new media screams at traditional, the bigger their heels dig. CEOs who tend to be from the financial suite look on with critical befuddlement and gas their senior marketers once very two years and decide to spend only 6% of their budgets on online (despite mounting evidence that they should be clsoer to half) . Rubel at MicroPersuasion had a good post on this a few months ago about the divide between these two camps of rainmakers – marketers and digital-ites. There is a huge chasm in between – one holds the future, ideas, the art of collaboration and the other holds the tradition, the money and the reality of a entire customer population. The movement and the establishment.

As Geoffrey Moore noted in "Crossing the Chasm" for innovations to flourish, there needs to be a group of people well-respected by both parties who can bridge the divide, so who's it going to be "Weinberger" – not likely, Fawkes – "better but the traditional side thinks based on "death of marketing" demeanour – he's too out there, Kawasaki – "maybe", Godin – "not sure digital culture thinks he has the chops", Peters – "getting long in the tooth", Collins "needs to lighten up" …who? who? who?..more likely its a collective of minds who are willing to come together and not be so radical and one-sided, otherwise we'll be hear a decade from now – with the chess pieces having moved a bit but still having the same conversation.

My two cents to the discussion…I just hate seeing discussion that's so black and white, when the answers are usually in shades of grey.

Whoa, wonderful comment. Thank you!

This feels like a resurrection of the art/commerce distinction, purity of motive and mind on the one hand, with suits, all venal, grasping and idea free, on the other. And here I was thinking that one of the interesting things about marketing and planners is how successfully they find joy and creativity even in projects that are for-hire. Dude, you are nourishing a captivity. You are reproducing the police state of the postwar intellectual. Planner, free thyself.

Thanks, Grant

1. Dropping the word marketing from a conference about marketing is just a 'marketing' gimmick
2. It's also classic blog comment fodder generator
3. Marketing is the trade name for non-zero sum communications. Always has, always will be.

Hang on, let me grab my "A post-structuralism for Dummies" manual. Here it is.

Death of an Author: Every work is eternally written here and now, with each re-reading, because the origin of meaning lies exclusively in language itself and its impressions on the reader.

For those who 'got into' marketing as a vocation for the suit, car and expense account, you may find yourself holding onto your spreadsheets as floatation devices from here on in. Piers, rightly as almost always, is noting that the trade of marketing is no longer interesting enough to demand a fee for a conference, or rather, enough to attract the creative minds who seek to play with culture and willing to pay their time to sit in a conference based around the problems in marketing.

Conferences have always played upon the human instinct to 'come together in a time of crisis'. (London Underground WWII, funerals, Alcohol Anonymous etc) – foolishly suits go along hoping insights will pour from the big screen projector saving us hours of (pleasurable) thinking.

Problems are what planners seek; they use processes of design to look at the common perceptions of communication and record the space that such investigations afford. Said space is for the media execution to be placed leaving just enough of a vacuum for the audience to get sucked into. Couple of my favourite renaissance planners – Leo D Vinci and Micky Angelo did all this without the need for a conference – in fact they were massively opposed to such gatherings. You couldn't even get Micky down the ale house for a chat some years when he's working on large scale projects.

So it's not the term 'marketing' that should be dropped from the title. It's 'conference'. The various BarCamp (O'Reilly style mini events) has kicked in the tech conference scene because the audience (the geeks and lifestyle VC's) want to talk to each other, not listen to a sage on the stage. Coffee mornings (R Davies et al) made a space for 'likeminded' to talk about the price of fish. These are zero-sum communication exercises where there are no intentional outcomes of such events, just breathing spaces for enthusiastic minds. Even the exchange of business cards has ceased – our blogs are our answering phones.

PSFK need to work harder to make an event worthwhile. The London event earlier this year, I hear, was great (possibly due to the fantastic venue – sorry!). R Davies did Interesting2007 with bunting and TED talks is the poster boy of 'fascination generation'.

I see that Missy (Suicide Girls) is still 'tbc'. Shame the rest of the line-up are in the business of 'marketing'.

Perhaps PSFK needs to open up the conference format. Let the attendees decide who they want and how it will be staged. Why not ask the 'consumers' who they want 'marketing' dudes to be inspired by. But most of all, marketing has got to stop acting like marketing, and be marketing. I expect PSFK to lead this, else, what is PSFK for?

On the other hand, just what role marketing specialists can play in these three missions and how they are to interact with other disciplines, strikes me as a much more open question, and one where the answers change historically. The current availability of massive amounts of transaction-level data, for example, is creating a revolution in statistical methods for setting prices and bundling goods. The cultural plenitude and flux phenomena that Grant tracks so vividly may be changing what we mean by branding, by social influence, by market segment, etc., and the skill-sets needed to accomplsh the purposes of marketing.

BTW, for those who don't like "consumer," I would consider "user." The negative connotations of the term (drug addicts, manipulative types) notwithstanding, it focuses attention on the purposes (uses) of the prospective purchaser.Those purposes could be practical, fanciful, status-oriented, etc. depending on the specific situation. And a "use" is a good unit of analysis for thinking about competition.

As for marketing – I agree that that term has to be driven by a change of view regarding the first term. If my efforts are targeting a potential "adopter", not a "consumer," does that change how I view my role and the nature of my work?

Regarding the current post — language evolution is largely viral, driven by adoption of replacements for words that eventually get pulled out of daily usage under the weight of their growing irrelevance. It will indeed be interesting to see whether this happens to the word "marketing".