A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

THE OBJECTIVE OF MARKETING ■ 101
to the idea of the basic marketing concept as driving the business, which
was far more important. According to <strong>Drucker</strong>, this concept would drastically
challenge the position of marketing in many companies, despite
the considerable evidence that this was clearly what should happen. In
<strong>Drucker</strong>’s view, marketing drove the business and needed authority in a
business to market correctly.
Peter used IBM as an example of the power of marketing. He said that
the reason that this company had successfully overcome the competition in
the early days of computer development was that IBM looked first at its
potential customers and asked what these customers wanted. Univac, RCA,
and GE, IBM’s competitor company, were driven not by marketing, but by
technology. As a result, their emphasis was on how they thought the product
should be, and not guided by their customer’s wants and needs. IBM,
by pursuing a marketing approach, came to dominate the market.
Not long after I graduated from Claremont, IBM stumbled and provided
a cautionary tale to the practice of marketing. Several years earlier
it had asked the wrong question of its potential customers and concluded
that only 1,000 personal computers could be sold every year if a personal
computer were developed. Based on this flawed analysis, IBM halted PC
development. This decision allowed Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to start
a revolution in their garage by realizing that there were millions of potential
customers who were ready to purchase an affordable “PC”. Their company,
Apple, was able to fulfill the needs of this market almost
unopposed. However, IBM recovered quickly when it recognized that
encouraging, rather than prohibiting, independents to develop software
for their operating system would best satisfy what the customer wanted.
Marketing, again. There is no question about marketing’s power.
My experience in an aerospace company about a year after Peter’s lecture
seemed to confirm his conclusions regarding the weak position of
marketing in many high-technology companies. At McDonnell Douglas
Astronautics Company, success came from bidding against competitors,
usually on a combination of low price and technological innovation.
However, the primary criteria were government specifications which had
to be met. Why waste resources on marketing and marketing research in
unearthing what the customer wanted when the customer would tell all
competitors exactly what was desired anyway?
All aerospace companies seemed to operate the same way in those days
in selling to government. All had marketing departments. However, in