It doesn’t have centuries of history behind it, like law or architecture. It doesn’t enjoy the prestige or popular admiration that other disciplines such as Fine Arts of Medicine inspire. The names of its great masters are scarcely known beyond its particular and small universe. It doesn’t promise to move the foundations of human evolution, like technology does. It doesn’t command the respect that other courses do in the field of study it’s included in. Not even in the heart of companies is it an especially venerated department.
So why did I choose Marketing as my passion and profession? What brought me to opt for a discipline that doesn’t even have a commonly accepted translation in my own language? My answer is simple: today, absolutely everything is Marketing. What to tell a young reader on the verge of deciding his or her future about the greatnesses of a profession? The answer is simple: pure Marketing. All the pages that have gone before me and all that follow are full of Marketing; packed with people engaged in Marketing for their respective trades. The clothes we wear, the car we drive, the house we live in is Marketing. Silently and intelligently, Marketing impregnates our lives.
Defending a concept in which one believes blindly in order to help a person in the difficult process of choice. This is the laudable goal of this book and this is exactly the laudable mission of Marketing: making them choose me, tipping the balance, supporting decision-making, and acting with accuracy at the precise moment in which the person makes the choice. What makes a mind choose one profession or another before knowing it in-depth? Think about it carefully. When one chooses, they do it according to an attractive image, to a group of positive attributes that has formed in their environment. In all of our decisions, whether they are vital or irrelevant, we act in a certain way as consumers, as customers: we choose what they “sold us best on” for each one, at each moment. That is why I opt for and firmly believe in the enormous capabilities of Marketing.
For a long time, Marketing has been mistakenly associated with consumer alienation; with brand tyranny; with advertising bombardment. But make no mistake: this is bad Marketing and I’m a lover of well-done Marketing, because Marketing is much more than a selling machine: it’s art and it’s science, simultaneously. In the same way a physician throws himself into his patient’s health and a lawyer into the legitimate interests of his clients, Marketing has the noble mission of sacrificing for the customers. And it’s no secret when I say that we all, fortunately, are sick or have legal problems from time to time, but we are customers every day. We make purchases every day, we consume every day, we choose every day.
Helping other companies understand the complex mechanism that makes a customer decide constitutes the cornerstone of my profession. I am dedicated to knowing customers in-depth; their motivations and needs; their attitudes and preferences; and I do it, not, as some may mistakenly think, to sell products and services at any cost, but rather so that they have exactly what they need, when they need it. My mission is that what they receive be as close as possible to what they expect to receive. If the customer is King, Marketing is his subject.
Over the course of my professional trajectory, I have learned to get to know my customers and to help other companies to get to know theirs, because only in this way is it possible to satisfy them. In order to do this, I have had to understand that Marketing is not a subject all about “cutting, pasting, and coloring”, as many people have tried to portray it. As I mentioned before, good Marketing is art and science; it uses a lot of intuition, but it also has a lot of empirical knowledge. As the textbook “Marketinian” I am, I have learned from people who know more than me in order to recreate a “New Marketing”. I have surrounded myself with prestigious scientists, statisticians, and geographers, mathematicians, and systems engineers in order to know the customer in-depth: with the sixth sense inherent in any good Marketing professional, but also with the irrefutable rigor of data.
Today, I feel proud to have contributed, with my small grain of sand, to making Marketing prestigious; to making other companies understand that they can have the best product or service in the world, but if they don’t know how to sell it because they don’t know their customers, all of their efforts will have been in vain. More and more, companies are believing in Marketing, and they consider it strategic. It was about time.
I have a secret little dream. It’s that one day, every Spanish company will have a Marketing professional on its Board of Directors. Until recently, this was a Utopian idea; it is slowly beginning to happen. I am convinced that the brilliant Marketing professionals of the future, some of whom are reading these very lines, will make my dream come true.