A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

98 ■ A CLASS WITH DRUCKER
Moreover, the image I had of a marketer was that of a fast-talking used-car
salesman wearing flashy clothes. Although I know today just how inaccurate
this image is for most marketers and salespeople, these were my prejudices
at the time. This was not how I saw myself, so my mind started to
wander at <strong>Drucker</strong>’s mention of the evening’s topic. I was more concerned
<strong>with</strong> my new job as a headhunter, anyway. This profession, too, had to do
<strong>with</strong> selling, but I hadn’t yet thought about that side of it.
Despite my indifference, however, Peter’s opening lines instantly brought
me back to earth and got my attention. First, he repeated what the company
president had told me four years earlier: “Marketing and selling are
not identical.” Then he went on to really wake me up. “Selling and marketing
are neither synonymous nor complementary,” he said. “One could
consider them adversarial in some cases. There is no doubt that if marketing
were done perfectly, selling, in the actual sense of the word, would be
unnecessary.” What was Peter saying? He had me. I listened on.
According to <strong>Drucker</strong>, it was the Japanese who invented real marketing,
and not in this century either, but back in the 1600’s. A merchant <strong>with</strong>
a different retailing concept came to Tokyo from out in the boondocks and
opened what today we would term a retail outlet. Moreover, this merchant
had a revolutionary concept of selling. Previously, all selling was done by
sellers who made or grew what they sold, whether it was food, clothing,
or fighting equipment.
<strong>Drucker</strong> said that this new merchant was different in two ways. First,
he didn’t sell a single class of goods. He sold all kinds of goods. Second, he
didn’t create what he sold. He bought goods from others who had created
them. Just like Sears, Macy’s, or Wal-Mart today, he saw himself as being a
buying agent for what his customers wanted. Consequently, this retailer
saw his task not of persuading others to purchase a product which he had
already had on hand and therefore must sell, but rather in discovering first
what his customers wanted and then getting these desired products from
others for resale.
According to <strong>Drucker</strong>, this concept became so popular in Japan that it
led to a conglomeration of retail establishments of this type. Apparently
the same concept caught on in the west about the same time, leading first
to general stores and, beginning in the early 1800’s, to the modern department
store. The significance was that this was not simply selling. A smart
retailer researched the market to have products that the consumer wanted
before he bought them for resale.