May I market for you?

Complete this sentence:

I work in marketing for _________.

Unless you're a smart ass and thought something like "I work in marketing for the money and the honeys," you probably filled the blank with the name of your company, the brand you represent or the category your product falls into.

I'd wager you didn't fill the blank with "customers."

You should have.

Of course you work for a company (or for yourself, if you're a consultant.) And of course your boss expects you to deliver results.  But if you still think in terms of delivering your services for the benefit of your company rather than for the benefit of your customer (or prospective customer), you're missing the point.  Smart marketers look at the transaction not as the thing itself, but as the by-product of the thing -- as the benefit gained as the result of a well-built win/win relationship.

I know.  You read lots of blog-like-objects and heed the advice of social media gurus (LOL); you've heard this before.  Marketing isn't about buying reach, it's about building relationships.  In the age of social marketing, companies need to think less about delivering messages and more about delivering value.  Massive TV buys be damned; you can rarely buy your way into people's hearts.

But here's the twist.  Maybe it was supposed to be this way all along.  What if marketing (as a concept and maybe even as a profession) actually started out as a service that was provided for consumers rather than a service that aimed to target them?  What if this thing that we have called "marketing" for the past 50 years or so has been nothing more than an ill-advised detour.

Everything old is new again, people.  Everything old is new...  Read on:

A couple of years ago, a super smart friend who had studied linguistics at university (and generally seemed to know a lot about a lot of things) told me that, in an early usage of the word, "marketing" referred to a service that one person performed for another.  For all I know, this friend was full of crap (quite possible, since he is also the creative director of a large digital agency) -- but the notion stuck with me and, if you think about it, is a pretty powerful one.  It kinda implies that marketing as we know it is just a big misunderstanding.

By this definition, marketing was not a service that people performed for the companies that employed them.  Marketing referred to a service that people (or companies, I suppose) performed for other regular people.  An offer to "market for you" would have been akin to saying to a friend, "I'm running out to the store.  Do you need me to pick up anything for you?"  If you were a particularly enterprising lad or lady you might have even found a way to earn your livelihood by marketing for others.  Run out to the marketplace, pick up a few things for a few people, earn a pocketful of pence and -- voila -- you, my good sir, were a marketer.

So you see?  Marketing was the act of procurement.  Not the act of promotion.  Did products get bought and sold because of this service?  Yes. Did 'marketers' match needs or wants with products that satisfied those needs or wants.  You bet.  Did the companies that provided those products, and the intermediaries who procured them on behalf of other individuals, profit from the transaction?  Presumably so.  But at the heart of the transaction, was a simple service provided for the benefit of an individual consumer, not the overly complicated service most of us provide for the benefit of the corporate entity that hands us our paychecks.

If we go along with its early definition, marketing wasn't about helping your company sell.  It was about helping people buy. Is that how you think about your job?  Are you helping people buy?  Or are you just foisting your wares upon a bunch of unsuspecting people, in the hopes that you might sell a few.

So let's take another stab at filling in that blank.  Then get out there and market for people.