There is one sentence you will hear about marketing A LOT, especially about extravagant fashion brands, consumer products and the creative fields. Whenever there is something that seems a little outside the ordinary or mainstream thinking, and a certain customer group starts buying into those products or services, the majority ceases to understand how it’s possible that people buy that. Usually, at this moment, they go to their default and the most popular reason:
“It’s just marketing”
I have been hearing this sentence quite a lot lately.
While it’s true that marketing can play an important role in generating interest in a product or service, it ain’t a magic bullet.
I think marketing is overrated since, clearly, a lot of people think it can make miracles happen. Marketing can’t sell a shitty product, at least not on a sustainable, long-term basis. Any business that lasts long enough is built on quality and its repeat customers. It’s definitely not just marketing.
Take for example Balenciaga, a fashion house founded in 1919 by the Spanish designer Cristóbal Balenciaga. OK, so these guys have been around for about 100 years, that’s a lot of time! Yes, they make radical designs and are truly different in the fashion brand world. Is the fact that people buy destroyed shoes or handbags in the form of plastic bin bags just marketing? No, it isn’t!
What Balenciaga did was find its niche customer group. While the designs that come out of the fashion house might be extravagant and unusual, they are original, and I’m assuming of high quality. Not everyone will like it, but it has its niche, and this niche values the qualities they sell. After all, luxury brands aren’t that much interested in the mainstream market except to let it spread the message about their products. I think the same goes for the art field.
Finding balance
In summary, I believe that bad products can’t be saved by great marketing. Same as a great product that cannot be sold by miserable marketing efforts. There are endless examples, and you know it.
Without marketing, even a great product will never get to the right hands, because they won’t know it exists. It no longer applies that a great product will sell on its own.
And vice versa, without a good product, no matter how hard you try and how great your marketing efforts are, you will not generate results and your business will likely fail.
Now, in the world of business, there exist companies and brands with a variety of mixtures of the two. There are only a handful of businesses that have a truly great product with fine marketing.
Having said all that, marketing isn’t a magic bullet, however, if a company has a good product, customer service and other business aspects, it really can work magic for the business. But I think that goes for all business departments.
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