Marketing is the NFL Quarterback of Business

Fascinating conversation this week around HubSpot’s financials and its implications for inbound marketing as a marketing discipline. Great blog post by my friend, Tom Webster.
In the many, many comments about Tom’s blog post, Brian Clark from Copyblogger mentioned the fact that, at the end of the day, the product itself matters more than the marketing approach. It really got me thinking.
Ultimately, marketing gets way more credit than it deserves, but marketing also gets way less credit than it deserves, because at the end of the day if you have a great product, it makes marketing look fantastic. If you have a terrible product, or even a mediocre product, it makes marketing look poor.

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what kind of marketing you use or how good of a marketer you are. The quality of the product ultimately wins. It matters. Right? You can’t put lipstick on a pig.
So the analogy that I used in the comments for this blog post is that marketing is essentially the NFL quarterback of business. Right? If your team is somehow fantastic and you happen to be the quarterback of a fantastic team, even if you’re not a fantastic quarterback per se, people think that you are, i.e. Trent Dilfer, when he took the Baltimore Ravens to the Super Bowl, was at best an okay quarterback, but won the Super Bowl.
Conversely if you’re a great quarterback on a terrible team, people don’t think you’re as good as you are. There are many, many, many examples of people who are fantastic individual players, but their team was terrible. Archie Manning, Peyton and Eli’s father, great example. Terrific quarterback always played on terrible teams.
So let’s understand that as much time as we spend talking about marketing and marketers, at the end of the day, there’s only so much they can do.

Your company has to be good, not just your marketing. (click to tweet)

Sprout Social Shoutout

Today’s Sprout Social shoutout is for Brian Clark who got this conversation started. Brian is the founder of Copyblogger. Terrific company, outstanding blog. One of the legends in the business. If you’re not following Brian Clark in social media, you absolutely need to do that, and go ahead and make that happen.

This video is from Jay Today is my near-daily 3-minute video where I talk about social media, content marketing, business and life. JayToday is available on Youtube, iTunes (as a video podcast), and at JayToday.tv.

The show is sponsored by Sprout Social (which I use for my social media), and Candidio (a great video editing service).

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