Mark Cuban with some provocative (I think) thoughts on marketing. He begins:
The best example of this was when I bought the Dallas Mavericks. When I bought the team the conventional wisdom was that we were in the basketball business. That our customers were entertained by the beauty of the game. In reality our real business was “creating sore throats from screaming and sore hands from clapping”. Sporting events are pretty much the only place where a CEO will scream and yell while sitting or standing right next to a 16 year old with a Mohawk and pierced everything and then hi five him/her when something good happens for their team.
Google realized early on that they are in the traffic monetization business. They started off in the search business, but quickly realized that while continuously improving search was important, continuously improving search and page view monetization was more important.