Hundreds of people were sitting at a marketing seminar, and the lecturer asked what kind of marketing goals you could and should have. No one answered. A little later on, he asked the same thing with the words ‘What is the purpose on marketing?’. A few shy voices exclaimed: ‘to create mental images’, ‘to sell’ and ‘to create demand’.

That is astonishing. And all of those people in there were marketing professionals, a.k.a. those people in Finland who spend a thousand million euros per year to marketing. And only a fraction of them ventured into guessing what is the purpose of marketing.

But what is the purpose of marketing?

Perhaps we should think about it as follows: the purpose of marketing is to change the race all together – to make the market situation change in a way that the status and the competitive advantage of the marketer are improved.

I’m sure that this is the way how Ingvar Kamprad, Luciano Benetton or Louis-Vuitton-Moët-Hennessy's Bernard Arnault see it. No one spends their money without them knowing exactly how that money will make a change or how it will quadruple itself in sales returns.

When you google ads by Ikea, Benetton or Vuitton, you’ll see their timeline and realize that their goal has more often been more on shocking the markets than on mere sales.

But all advertisers are not Ikeas and Vuittons.

Malls, for example, spend big budgets on advertising but their retailer associations cannot agree on anything that would actually change the race and create competitive advantage. Their fall campaigns are always School’s here! and January sales are called Hulabaloo!.

Political parties and all sorts of special-interest groups also have faith in marketing. Their ads tend to have a picture of a kid or teddy bear with a meaningless punch line such as ‘Together towards a brighter future’. Euros are spent and nothing is changed. And car commercials. Year after year, decade after decade, they say the same old thing. Performance for those who know what they want.

Luckily enough we also have some inspiring examples as well. Take, for example, TV ads by Lidl. They take people’s prejudices and turn them into entertainment. As a bystander, I dare to claim that Lidl’s advertising changes people’s attitudes and brings in new customers. And amongst all that lame car marketing, VW Passat’s ad The Force is a refreshing clip to watch.

But as an advertiser, you can use much more than just seconds and advert millimetres to further your goals. Change the entire domain’s game and conquer new fields by means of cunning repositioning. All you need is an inventive new concept, and there’s no going back.

By adding oat bran and raisins to a basic almond chocolate bar, you got yourself a muesli bar that is sold as a snack. Muesli bars created an entirely new product group and it’s added value brought on some added price as well. There was no competition, and the old basic chocolate bars were left to compete amongst themselves. And somebody came up with the idea of adding caffeine and C-vitamin to sodas – and along came the segment of energy drinks.

Swatch makes cheap digital watches, but it has made people believe that watches are actually jewellery and accessories. And that you must have different kinds of them for different occasions.

Repositioning seems self-evident after somebody has invented it: organic, light, SUV, small laptops. But it’s self-evident only after it’s already on the market, so be alert, or you might miss a great opportunity.

Jyri Erma,
Planner, Copywriter