Do true marketing experts tire of this expression, digital marketing? Digital is not marketing!

The expression, known as “digital marketing”, coined by unqualified cowboys, snake oil spruikers and confused lay marketers, this misleading term only requires operational and administrative software know-how and implementation duties. They are the functional responsibility of specialists with a niche skillset.

Digital skills are simply the 2020 replacement for 1960s short-hand and typing skills!

Digital skills are far removed from genuine marketing skills: They are mostly promotional focused, activities that occur way downline after foundational strategic marketing guidelines are set according to the vital skills inherent in potent, comprehensive and disciplined leadership and executive marketing management.

Skills in YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many other social media, “content”, which is mainly marketing communications management, website optimisation, and email management are not “marketing skills, they are media skills. I agree they are vital to have and to utilise well, given the overall impact, reach and power of the internet and online communication, but it still doesn’t validate calling a gas pedal a car.

Yes, conducting online distribution of non-fungible products such as courses, artwork, entertainment and softcopy (movies, books, music, etc.) is a post-product development, distribution activity: Another subset of marketing activity, but NOT marketing.

Skills in business direction, brand equity management, merger and acquisition, corporate governance, strategic planning, integrated marketing communications, pricing strategy, and many other parts of managing the whole interconnection of the elements of exchange is real marketing!

The madness has to stop! Regaling and praising snake oil spruikers because they’ve successfully manipulated SEO, SMM, SEM, and PPC and spin a yarn based solely on their trickery in capitalising on “there’s a fool born every minute” is ludicrous!

The impotent, complacent, bureaucratic, world of marketing academia has to wake up to the commercial reality of its failings…publish or perish is NOT enough: The catchphrase that matters should be educate or erode!

Of course, the grifters, con men and profit-motivated benefactors of the misunderstanding of the expression, “digital marketing”, will object to and protest this post with vehemence, but I wonder if there are enough genuine experts out there who remember the true meaning of marketing to
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