Marketing is all about Relationships

Marketers used to have enough budget and enough control to get their job done. It was sort of “shut up and advertise this” and they worked with their advertising agencies and everything was good. Today marketing is about growth and marketing is about driving success for the business. You can’t do that within the marketing function. That’s about solution creation, that’s about data, it’s about partnerships with businesses.

At the end of the day, the problem with marketers today is that if they don’t have the ability to build that relationship action plan, make those connections, and collaborate effectively, they shouldn’t be in the job.

The art of marketing has always been the same thing: it’s a relationship. It’s a relationship with the customer. In the B2B world the art of marketing is to create a relationship that’s actually physical, tactile between an individual within one company and an individual with another, but in the broad brand, whether it’s Nike or Starbucks or whatever it is, it’s a connectivity. It’s all about a relationship.