I have asked this question of a number of people. I have received a variety of responses and I will share these. I just want to weigh in myself. My background is engineering. Numbers, equations, physics okay I see your eyes rolling. Before becoming a student of marketing I was a facts based guy. Only that which I could see touch taste feel had any relavance. While that is still true marketing has taught me another dimension. The dimension of conversation. Conversation changes everything.

When you talk with an audience to find out what do you really want? You get some interesting responses. Sometimes you get exactly what you expected, but there is that ocassion where people tell you the truth and give you exactly what you need, “what they want”. Then if you give it to them and continue the conversation you are in a position to give them what they want again.

Marketing is that multidirectional (that’s an engineer’s word) platform for communication. Everyone has a perspective and marketing is that channel that encourages the sharing of these perspectives. One of the commenters as you will see painted a picture of the old style of marketing whereby the product was defined by the company and they told the market what IT wanted. It was primarily one-way. The customer had very little say.

Today the customer has all of the say. The web has so empowered the customer with knowledge THEY / WE know everything. There are not secrets. In Jeff Jarvis’ book What Would Google Do he describes this shift as going from managing lack or secrets to managing abundance and transparency.

So in conclusion I do think marketing matters as long as it remains an effective place for people to communicate about what they want. It’s only as good as what it has done for you today, or in the last minute.

You can see comments on my Linkedin.com page. Peter Winters