One of the top executives in Weft Corporation echoes this sentiment: I always say that there is no such thing as a marketing genius; there are only great markets.
Some markets are mainly propped up by marketing though, like diamonds. But I agree that it’s more virtuous to fulfill needs that already exist.
The question would be whether there’s a genius VP of DeBeers that’s responsible for diamonds being a special case or whether that’s more an intrinsic aspect of the market for diamonds.
It seems likely to me there was a key person at some point in the past that determined the core strategies of things like “maintain a full monopoly with highly inflated prices” and “pay off Hollywood producers to show engagement rings as this super important thing” and such, in ways that most others would not have, and that diamond profitability is through the roof versus the counterfactual. But I’m guessing that most of the credit for that was then reaped by subsequent managers (CEOs, VPs of Marketing, and so on down the line) of DeBeers, who were mostly cashing in on that good strategy.
Executive was not talking about what is or is not virtuous, which they would likely consider irrelevant, but rather who deserves credit or blame for success or failure.
Well, he was talking about marketing vs choice of market, and my comment was riffing on that :-) The book uses the quote to make a point about individual credit, but I’m not sure it fits—even if success depends only on choice of market, individuals can still deserve credit for choosing a great market.
I would expect that it’s normally not the job of the marketing people to chose the market but to implement a strategy for the market that the CEO chose.
Some markets are mainly propped up by marketing though, like diamonds. But I agree that it’s more virtuous to fulfill needs that already exist.
The question would be whether there’s a genius VP of DeBeers that’s responsible for diamonds being a special case or whether that’s more an intrinsic aspect of the market for diamonds.
It seems likely to me there was a key person at some point in the past that determined the core strategies of things like “maintain a full monopoly with highly inflated prices” and “pay off Hollywood producers to show engagement rings as this super important thing” and such, in ways that most others would not have, and that diamond profitability is through the roof versus the counterfactual. But I’m guessing that most of the credit for that was then reaped by subsequent managers (CEOs, VPs of Marketing, and so on down the line) of DeBeers, who were mostly cashing in on that good strategy.
Executive was not talking about what is or is not virtuous, which they would likely consider irrelevant, but rather who deserves credit or blame for success or failure.
Well, he was talking about marketing vs choice of market, and my comment was riffing on that :-) The book uses the quote to make a point about individual credit, but I’m not sure it fits—even if success depends only on choice of market, individuals can still deserve credit for choosing a great market.
I would expect that it’s normally not the job of the marketing people to chose the market but to implement a strategy for the market that the CEO chose.