Drucker, marketing, branding

In Tiny Product Change, Huge Sales Impact: The Billion Dollar Branding Lesson from Morton Salt the author states: "Peter Drucker has famously said that the only job of a business is to create customers.  He hasn’t said exactly how to do it.  That’s where branding comes in."
Drucker did offer advice on how to create a customer. Chapter 9 "The Purpose and Objectives of a Business" in Drucker's Management, Revised Edition  offers a different thought process. It is fairly lengthy and there is a major, major, major danger in quoting him out of the larger context.
The word "brand" is not the focus of Drucker's thinking. He would probably point out the long list of dead brands.

"… snip, snip … The profit motive and its offspring maximization of profits are just as irrelevant to the function of a business, the purpose of a business, and the job of managing a business … snip, snip … It is a major cause for the misunderstanding of the nature of profit in our society and for hostility profit, which are among the most dangerous diseases of a society or (of) organizations. It is largely responsible for the worst mistakes of public policy—in this country well as in Western Europe—which are squarely based on the failure to understand, the nature, function, and purpose of business enterprise.
… snip, snip … Above all, consumerism should dispel the confusion which largely explains why there has been so little real marketing.
When managers speak of marketing, they usually mean the organized performance of all selling functions.
This is still selling.
It still starts out with "our products."
It still looks for "our market."
True marketing starts out … snip, snip … with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values.
It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?"
It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"
It does not say, "This is what our product or service does."
It says, "These are the satisfactions the customer looks for, values and needs … snip, snip …
Indeed, selling and marketing are antithetical rather than synonymous or even complementary.
Marketing alone does not make a business enterprise … snip, snip …
The second function of a business is, therefore, innovation—the provision of different economic satisfactions … snip, snip …"

Even the quotes above are a misrepresentation of Drucker's mental landscape. Also see chapter 8 The Theory of the Business.

Also see The Definitive Drucker and Marketing in Crisis