More on Fundamental Marketing: Still a Rare Skill

Yesterday morning's Wall Street Journal piece in the "Theory & Practice" column of its Marketplace Section was entitled, "Seeing Through Buyers' Eyes."

As do so many of this column's pieces, it rehashes an introductory marketing concept- understanding customer needs and potential uses of your product or service.

Will we never learn? This is such fundamental marketing, and, yet, it still gets coverage in a recurring column in the nation's most widely-disseminated business daily.

The article in question recounts various large companies' efforts to focus product development on how consumers would actually use their products, and what the needs of those consumers actually are, as they pertain to the companies' offerings. GM and P&G are mentioned.

As I have written before, perhaps it is a measure of overall management mediocrity that this sort of topic commands such attention. As someone who holds two marketing degrees, I can attest to the fact that the subject of this article is neither news, nor a recent finding. This sort of thing is literally the most fundamental marketing principle in existence.

Which leads me to once again, as in my prior post, be reassured by the mediocrity and lack of attention to fundamentals of most executives. This article probably is news to a lot of WSJ readers.

That just makes it easier to select the superior companies, which have superior-performing executives, in which to invest, for consistently superior total returns.