Marketing isn't Selling's evil twin sister!

I found my years in Product Marketing to be invaluable to how I perceived the role of Marketing. I still believe many people see Marketing as the evil co-conspirator of Selling, that together, use psychological trickery and constant interruption to get us to part with our money against our will. But those wonderful years in PM taught me that that couldn’t be further from the truth.
You see, when marketing is adopted as a philosophy of “make what the customer wants (or will want)” and is pervasive across the company — case in point Apple — then the “evil twins” become just a figment of our imagination. Marketing is understanding markets. And most markets that I know of have people in them :).
We can apply the same thinking to Content Strategy, i.e. understand the markets well enough so that we can provide content that is useful, or better yet, have enough insights into the markets that you stay one step ahead and anticipate what the market will find useful a la Steve Jobs and company.