A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

100 ■ A CLASS WITH DRUCKER
The innovation introduced by the Japanese retailer in the 17th century
was significant in that for the first time, the emphasis was not on the
product, but rather on the customer. Again, under this new concept, the
seller had products that the customer already wanted, rather than trying
to sell what the merchant had on hand and therefore had to unload in
order to make a profit.
To do this, the retailer, manufacturer, or producer had to first discover
what it was that customers wanted. This led to new techniques and methods
of researching the market. For the first time, the emphasis was on the
customer and not the product. As direct marketer Freeman Gosden, Jr.
once told one of my classes in marketing, “It’s not what you want to sell,
it’s what your customer wants to buy.”
Recently I was watching an interview <strong>with</strong> one of the judges on
American Idol. He was asked to comment on the decline in sales in the
recording industry at the same time that American Idol and its alumni are
having such success. “That’s easy,” he said. “The recording studios have
been trying to give the public what they think the public wants. We let the
public decide, and then we give it to them.”
Marketing Is the Basis of Any Business
<strong>Drucker</strong> went on to explain that marketing was more than just an important
business function. In fact, he said it wasn’t a business function at all,
but rather the basis of any business. It was a mistake to consider marketing
on an equal basis <strong>with</strong> other functionary areas such as manufacturing,
because marketing permeated every aspect of the business. He continued
that marketing’s importance was at last recognized when companies began
to add marketing departments to their organizations. However, Peter
pointed out that, although many corporations agreed <strong>with</strong> “the marketing
concept,” which primarily emphasized the customer and paid lip service
to it, in practice many, if not most, companies ignored this reality.
<strong>Drucker</strong> said that companies struggled to adopt the marketing concept
organizationally in several ways. Some companies added a separate
department which was responsible for either marketing research or marketing
strategy, but they really functioned as staff to top management,
production divisions, or a separate sales division. Others combined marketing
and sales into a single department; sometimes <strong>with</strong> marketing in
charge, sometimes <strong>with</strong> sales in charge. Few companies gave much thought