Marketing’s ultimate goal is to make itself obsolete.
Marketing deals with matchmaking between people and products. Thus marketing encompasses know-how about people and their needs, about products and their benefits and about bringing the two together via some kind of interaction, be it communication, distribution, design or other things.
Marketing is a discipline that builds tools, methods and means to enable this matchmaking process. Best marketers are masters of tools, methods and means, yet they become secondary when true matchmaking occurs.
Best matches, true wins and wildest successes happen beyond the arsenal of marketing. When magic ignites and sales spread like wildfire, something else is at play. It’s the whole company coming in sync with the market. It is every department doing this matchmaking, and if that’s the case, marketing as a department and also as a discipline becomes obsolete.
What remains and does not perish is marketing as a way of thinking. Marketing campaigns still exist, yet they’re not putting lipstick on a pig. They are the real beauty, they are the charisma, they are the magic. And lo and behold will you find growth in such companies.