In November, 2012, we titled our very first Idea Email with a line inspired by the sentence Apple used to introduce the second generation of the iPad: “Technology at its very best is invisible.”
In our version, we substituted “marketing” for the word technology.
In that first Idea Email, we wrote what we still believe to be the goal of great marketing:
The goal of great marketing should be to make the customer smarter, stronger, happier, or whatever the customer wants when they purchase a product or join an association or sign up for a service. When you emphasize how your product can help customers achieve something, they don’t think of it as marketing. They think of it as help. And that’s when marketing is at its very best.
Michael Lewis’ current bestseller, Flash Boys, invites us into the world of tech-driven, high-speed, high-frequency securities trading. Marketing executives will quickly recognize the types of people, patterns and “higher truths” they have encountered during the past couple of decades of tech-driven marketing in this story set on Wall Street.
If you follow the social media trends of the zeptosecond, you’ve probably noticed there’s at least one consistent factor. No matter what this week’s hip new social media fad might be, General Electric (GE) will be the first mega-sized business-to-business marketer to try it out.