Want to save tons of money on marketing? Like, everything you're spending on it right now?
Easy. Dump it. Kill your marketing initiatives. All of them.
Forget everything you thought you knew about “marketing”. Because most of it is probably wrong, misinformed or at best distorted by years of seeing your market through the lens of whatever it was you were trying peddle. This inside-out view becomes ingrained. It’s also one to which we become so accustomed we don’t even notice it anymore. Like an overweight spouse. After a time, we fail to see or we just give up. We view it as normal. “Hey, what’s the problem”?
Yeah, I know. A marketing guy making noises like this is heresy, right?. Unless like me, you’ve spent 30-plus years watching money get torched in the self-delusional, self-hypnosis that so many companies perform on themselves everyday. And the waste of time and money. Everyday. And the wondering about why nothing works.
Bottom-line: “Marketing”, defined as all the things you do to give your target customers compelling reasons to buy, that’s informed by anything other than what those same targets specifically and explicitly tell you, is a waste of your time and money. Not to mention that of your investors, shareholders and all stakeholders. Marketing that's based on what you think it should be rather than what your buyers tell you it must be is no more and no less than a boondoggle.
The challenge is that so many companies – owners, executives, investors and managers – default to the “inside-out” mentality and point-of-view. The great irony here is that, Internet technology enables practically any business of any size to hear what their target audiences – their marketplace – have to say, suggest, implore and demand. On a nonstop basis. Cheap.
Marketing doesn’t have to be a “monologue” anymore. It can be exactly what we and ad legend Lee Clow have mutually declared what it must be from now on: a dialogue. Full disclosure: my shop is beta testing a web-based application called, not surprisingly, DialogueTDN. The first beta site: Club One, the San Francisco Bay Area health and fitness centers. As we roll it out, you’ll see in this space what we mean by revenue-minded marketing being all about user-generated revenue. In the meantime, save your money.
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