It’s always funny to think that while a European discovered the New World, and with it the greatest market in the History of Mankind, the foundations of marketing were born in North America, and in Europe we have been incapable, to date, of even looking for a valid translation for this universal word…

Apart from academic definitions, I have always looked on marketing as an art… the art of selling. I know it might sound surprising, or even cause disgust, but “art” and “sales” are not, in my humble opinion, conflicting concepts. Good marketing seduces, innovates, and above all, transforms. By what mysterious process is a company’s need to sell transformed into a customer’s purchase impulse, without them even realizing it? Is that not art?

Since it is inevitable when speaking of marketing, I’ve already mentioned the terms “market” and “customer”, understanding the former as the sum of all the latter. Over time, companies have accepted that the difference between simple marketing and “intelligent marketing” is going a step further and progressing from one concept to another. Understanding the market well is necessary, but insufficient. In order to be accurate, it is essential that after this process follows another, much more complex one that consists of “using a microscope” to focus on the customer. Seen from afar, we are all the same. It is only possible to identify ourselves by looking closely.

We all know what kind of customer we are, for each one of the products and services we consume. And we all usually complain about how poorly many of our providers function and how much more they could get from us if they were really interested in us. In-depth customer knowledge is the cornerstone of “intelligent marketing”. When a company has a portfolio of several dozen consumers, digging deep into consumer’s needs and behaviors is a relatively simple task. But what happens when the mass of customers contains hundreds of thousands or millions people?

It is essential that marketing, and those responsible for its management in our country’s companies, transform itself into an engine for change, replace the traditional focus on the product that has characterized it for years, and take organizations towards a new orientation towards the customer that involves the entirety of the company. Knowing the real value of each customer, determining their potential lifespan in the heart of the company, and acting according to these two factors is the only possible path to optimizing costs and increasing sales. “Focusing on the objective” and centering it on the customer is almost obligatory for any company that wants to grow. I can’t think of any better way to engage in “intelligent marketing”.