I was chatting with a friend yesterday. I realized that, despite being at the cutting edge, he seemed to misunderstand what I was working on. The good old “forest for the trees” problem. I was talking to him about setting him up on the RapOuts platform (RapOuts is a client I work for) to promote a documentary he is producing.

He kept referencing one aspect of his event as being “where RapOuts could help” – namely spreading the word about the selection and user voting process of his event. He didn’t seem to see much long-term benefit past helping him spread this idea – in short, he was thinking like a marketer. I wanted him to use this push to create a communications channel that he could use indefinitely to talk directly to the people who care about his message, to make sure that the next time he wanted to push an idea, he didn’t have to recreate all the legwork. I wanted him to think of himself as building a distribution channel for his own needs.

In trying to bridge our disconnect, I made a distinction between thinking like a marketer and thinking like a distributor. Heads up, I’m going to use a very narrow definition of distributor in this article – a definition coined by European culture – ‘Any natural or legal person, including a retailer, who only stores and places on the market for third parties.’

What’s the difference between distribution and marketing? Marketers take an idea and spread it far and wide. Distributors build a channel that they control and that is used to connect things to people. That’s pretty esoteric, so here’s an example. Joe dons his distributor hat and builds a series of billboards up and down highway 280 from San Jose to San Francisco. He wants to sell a service, namely advertising on the billboards, so he switches his role from distributor to marketer and designs a message to sell his service. He uses his own billboards (distribution channel) to advertise his service by putting up an “advertise here, Call Joe @ 415.555.5555? ad (marketing). The companies that call Joe and eventually rent his billboards to promote their goods and services are all marketers.

It seems like a mundane distinction, but it’s an important one for the independents. The current technological revolution, mixed with ample competition, is forcing people to get out of specialization and take responsibility for their success in many avenues. Here are some examples in classic ‘Willis Quick List” fashion:

Willis Quick List #1 – So you don’t agree that specialization is dying?