You know, I never completely answered this.

While I feel that I have focused more on making SmashingRed more about web design, the fact that I work with small business implicitly requires that I be a bit of a marketing consultant to them.

Many of my clients still think that Marketing is something they do if they have some extra money or some nebulous intangible that they can’t do because they didn’t go to school and study it. Well, neither did I, but I have read and implemented much of what I learned and realised that Marketing, in a practical sense, is about establishing trust, building relationships and fulfilling the desires. In other words to get people to like you, and agree to buy your product or service and come back for more or refer you to to others.

Marketing is so entwined with every aspect of business that to say that you don’t know how to do marketing is to not understand business at all. The way you answer the phone, deliver your product, fulfil orders, speak in public; that’s all marketing. As John Jantsch, Micheal Gerber, Jay Conrad Levinson, Seth Godin and others would say–to be in business is to be in Marketing.