Ok I admit, I had a hard time picking the third adjective. I hope you like ‘frivolous’.
But I’ll tell you what’s frivolous: when someone says ‘marketing advice’, ‘free’ and ‘effective’ all in the same sentence.A neuron in my head screeches, grabs an ice pick and starts chipping away on the inside of my head to escape that execrable idea.
For example:
You walk into your neighbourhood bistro which serves decent coffee and artisanal baked goods. It’s rather late in the day, which means it is getting quieter and that some of the goods may not sell out. Do you:
A) Gladly select your favourite pastries and feel chuffed that you got to take your time selecting the goodies without elbows in your ribs
B) Ask the proprietor if the baked goods are on discount because ‘it’s rather late in the day and you won’t sell them anyway’?
(If you picked A, well good on you. If you thought ‘who on Earth would pick B?’ well let me assure you – I’ve witnessed the incident before).
And in the incident where the customer had the gumption to suggest half off the goods – and chided the proprietor for not acquiescing – they left sans cake and a cheery ‘See you again!’ as the door slammed behind them.
Everyone has talent, skill and function. What they produce, even if often seems inconsequential such as a loaf of bread, is the culmination of not just the concoction of raw materials but also the use of implicit and explicit capabilities to produce the final product. It may be used well (or not) and the results speak for themselves.
So the expense is not only in the ingredients but in the effort – ask your Mum, she’ll know.
Output-based marketing is the long suffering step child of cheap and cheery (but pointless) marketing efforts. No, there is no strategy involved when the goal is to print 10,000 coupons and dump it into every mailbox in X-Y vicinity. Marketing is not Sales + Advertising, never will be, unless you have an amateur running the show.
Just as with most meaningful, well regarded and bountiful efforts marketing requires investment and it is in itself, an investment. And that makes it a complicated animal to manoeuvre and measure; there is no Great Rule Book of Marketing for Everything because every bonafide practitioner knows this: you operate on multiple applied theories in parallel and it is subject to trial and error. Consider this: Less than 3% of new consumer packaged goods exceed first-year sales of $50 million — considered the benchmark of a highly successful launch (Schneider, Hall). Cue NOOK, Coca Cola BLAK and smokeless well, smokes.
Many products suffer as a result of brand detachment from over extension, whilst others seem to be lost in the sea of the ‘so what’s new about this’ edition chucked at the market along with 40,000 others swimming in the same pit of marketing noise. A certain luxury car brand famously updated its brand tagline to a single word that is easily translated as ‘happy’ and instead of spreading happiness and satisfaction it was mostly met with disorientation and lackluster amusement. Although a reasonable amount was invested in marketing to position the new tagline, it certainly didn’t have the impact previous taglines made and quite possibly didn’t enjoy an equivalent amount of investment comparatively, monetary and otherwise. The message just didn’t resonate.
Marketing isn’t just going to ‘get to work’ when the enterprise is lazy, conservative and inflexible. Throwing lots of money, time and effort at it may not solve all of one’s problems but it can certainly do plenty more than ‘free’, ‘recycled’ and ‘makes a lot of noise’.
Because at the end of the day, customers choose whom they want to tune in to.
Melcontentious 