Today’s central problem facing business is not a shortage of goods but a shortage of customers. Most of the world’s industries can produce far more goods than the world’s consumers can buy. Overcapacity results from individual competitors projecting a greater market share growth than is possible. If each company projects a 10 percent growth in its sales and the total market is growing by only 3 percent, the result is excess capacity. This in turn leads to hypercompetition. Competitors, desperate to attract customers, lower their prices and add giveaways. These strategies ultimately mean lower margins, lower profits, some failing companies, and more mergers and acquisitions. Marketing is the answer to how to compete on bases other than price. Because of overcapacity, marketing has become more important than ever. Marketing is the company’s customer manufacturing department. But marketing is still a terribly misunderstood subject in business circles and in the public’s mind. Companies think that marketing exists to help manufacturing get rid of the company’s products. The truth is the reverse, that manufacturing exists to support marketing. A company can always outsource its manufacturing. What makes a company prosper is its marketing ideas and offerings. Manufacturing, purchasing, research and development (R&D), finance, and other company functions exist to support the company’s work in the customer marketplace. Marketing is too often confused with selling. Marketing and selling are almost opposites. “Hard-sell marketing” is a contradiction. Long ago I said: “Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. Marketing is the art of creating genuine customer value. It is the art of helping your customers become better off. The marketer’s watchwords are quality, service, and value.” Selling starts only when you have a product. Marketing starts before a product exists. Marketing is the homework your company does to figure out what people need and what your company should offer. Marketing determines how to launch, price, distribute, and promote your product/service offerings to the marketplace. Marketing then monitors the results and improves the offering over time. Marketing also decides if and when to end an offering. All said, marketing is not a short-term selling effort but a longterm investment effort. When marketing is done well, it occurs before the company makes any product or enters any market; and it continues long after the sale. Lester Wunderman, of direct marketing fame, contrasted selling to marketing in the following way: “The chant of the Industrial Revolution was that of the manufacturer who said, ‘This is what I make, won’t you please buy it?’ The call of the Information Age is the consumer asking, ‘This is what I want, won’t you please make it?’ ”1 Marketing hopes to understand the target customer so well that selling isn’t necessary. Peter Drucker held that “the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”2 Mark-eting is the ability to hit the mark. Yet there are business leaders who say, “We can’t waste time on marketing. We haven’t designed the product yet.” Or “We are too sucxii