Now let’s look in more detail at marketing, starting with the basics.

Look at the list below, think about each one, and then tick which you think is NOT a marketing decision.

When I say marketing decision, I don’t mean a departmental decision in a larger company, I mean a marketing decision in the broadest sense.

  • Your marketing budget
  • The automatic thank you for your order email
  • Your Outlook email footer
  • The layout of your website
  • The colour of your logo
  • How much you charge
  • The car you drive to meetings
  • How your customers pay you
  • Your payment terms
  • Your phone ringtone
  • Your LinkedIn profile image
  • Your Meta (Facebook) page user name
  • Your answer to the question, ‘So what do you do?’
  • Your website look and feel
  • How you get people to contact you from the website
  • The price you charge your customers
  • Your payment terms – how long you give them
  • The background you choose on your Zoom meetings
  • Where you take a client for lunch
  • What you eat at lunch with a client
  • Your search engine description
  • Your strapline
  • The design of your business card
  • What socks you wear to a meeting
  • Which salesperson you hire

Yes, as you’ve no doubt guessed, every single one of them is a marketing decision.

When we do this with Finance people, thay usually say things like budgets, and targets are not a marketing decision – the point of the exercise is

WE ARE ALL MARKETING PEOPLE – WE ALL DO MARKETING

So, for example, the finance director, setting the budgets, is doing marketing, unless they are deliberately setting out to make problems for the company, they are setting budgets, balancing resources to support and help the company achieve its goals, that is a marketing decision