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When it is a Patagonian Toothfish - renamed into a Chilean Seabass for promotional purposes. The price and popularity of fish seems to have little to do with taste or nutritional content, and everything to do with marketing. To give just one example, Patagonian Toothfish was undesirable until a Californian fish merchant marketed it as the new-found delicacy of Chilean Seabass in the late 1970s29, pushing the price to over PS60/$85 per kilo. It isn't even a seabass! Sadly, the result of all the popularity is that stocks of this once-abundant fish, found in the deep (by which I mean anything from 300 m to over 3.5 km down) Southern Ocean, and able to grow to over 2 m in length and 100 kg in weight, are now threateningly low. And it takes 45 years to replace a 45-year-old fish.

Every time you answer the phone, it's marketing. Every time you send an e-mail, it's marketing. Every time someone uses your product, it's marketing. Every word you write on your Web site is marketing. If you build software, every error message is marketing. If you're in the restaurant business, the after-dinner mint is marketing. If you're in the retail business, the checkout counter is marketing. If you're in a service business, your invoice is marketing.

Marketers for years have talked about the five Ps of marketing. (There are more than five of them, but everyone has their favorite five.) Some of them include: * Product * Pricing * Promotion * Positioning * Publicity * Packaging * Pass-along * Permission This is the marketing checklist: a quick way to make sure you've done your job, a way to describe how you're going to go about getting people to buy what the factory just made.

Marketing was really better called "advertising." Marketing was about communicating the values of a product after it had been developed and manufactured. That's clearly not a valid strategy in a world where the product attributes (everything from service to design) are now at the heart of what it means to be a marketer. Marketing is the act of inventing the product. The effort of designing it. The craft of producing it. The art of pricing it. The technique of selling it. How can a Purple Cow company not be run by a marketer?