Fred Wilson blogged about marketing:
I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra).
Brad Feld piled on with a post titled: Why a Start-Up Shouldn't Have a Marketing Budget. Brad says when he hears the word "marketing" he vomits in his mouth a little.
But, Brad's not anti marketing. He's anti bad marketing. He actually says every one of his start-ups spends money on marketing. It's just that the marketing efforts are "wired into the DNA" of the product and company.
And Fred, after dismissing the importance of "marketing," endorses a bunch of activities from his portfolio company that could easily be called marketing.
The word "marketing" encompasses a bunch of good activities and a bunch of bad activities; a bunch of useful philosophies and un-useful philosophies. The question is which specific marketing activities and philosophies are productive and useful and which are a waste of time and money.
And that depends on the specific company, product, industry. We can all agree throwing $10k to a social media consultant to "promote" a product on The Twitter is a waste. But usually it's more complicated. For example, Fred noted he was referring only to consumer internet companies and not enterprise SaaS companies. That's a crucial distinction. Another example: manning a booth at an expensive trade show like CES may be a good marketing expense for Orbotix, but not a good marketing expense for other companies.
Marketing is neither good nor bad, neither a waste nor a necessity. It's both; it depends. This sounds obvious, and maybe it is, but it seems worth keeping in mind when reading broad-brush posts like the one Fred wrote this morning.