Here's a slide from a marketing unit I took this semester. You'll have to ignore the death by PowerPoint. I'm sure you've seen similar statistics before. Generally taken from the Fortune 500 or similar, a survey that demonstrates how poorly senior management consider marketing. At least that's how it's explained in lectures. But that's not right. If these managers are running the most successful businesses in the world, why is there an assumption they're wrong? One would think they're doing a pretty damn good job as it is. Maybe that's exactly where marketing should be. ...

In my last post I blamed universities for creating bad clients. But maybe I could blame the industry.When I started my undergraduate degree at the tender age of seventeen, I had no idea what marketing was. Neither did any of my mates. We were all under the impression that marketing was advertising, and I'm sure many would argue this perception often doesn't change, even after you graduate.Our dream of working on ads was soon crushed by crippling numbers and boring accounting lectures. But maybe the reason we have bad clients is not because of the way marketing is taught. Instead perhaps all marketers inherently want to be advertisers, a misconceived possibility pushed upon them before OWeek due to ignorance.Is the marketing industry not marketing itself appropriately to high school students?...

In at least two of my units throughout my marketing degree I've been asked to develop a marketing plan as a piece of major assessment. This degree, for the most part, and particularly these units, is designed to teach people how to be marketers. Or as I prefer to call them; clients.But in both cases, the assessment involved putting together a campaign. Any assignment that said, "We'll get our advertising agency to develop and build a creative strategy" would have failed, Instead, students were required to develop creative (as the client), and in most cases without any kind of strategy.Coming from the arrogant advertising side, is this not giving students the wrong idea of how things work?Do these students go on to become that client who gets way too involved with the creative? Or comes up with an idea early on and pushes it from the start? Or perhaps they'll simply be unwilling to pay for strategy because they've never heard of it before?Anyway, I think the way marketing is taught is the reason to blame for poor client behavior. Ironically, the poor campaign that results is usually blamed on the agency.And on a side note, I wonder if media peeps have similar feelings....

Brands are quickly jumping on Facebook in massed. And most of them are putting a some money behind media and these pages to build strategy, content and a well managed community.Sooner or later though, there'll be too many brands on Facebook. There's only so much room in one's consideration set for brands they'll follow on Facebook, before they say no more. The quality of content, freebies that are given away and innovation will make a difference. So will the degree of how rad your brand is (banks and life insurance companies might struggle). Above all, I imagine given how lazy consumers tend to be, it will be survival of fastest. Those brands that get in early will probably succeed simply because people can't be bothered deleting them....