The problem I have with most of the marketing blogs I read is that they seem to be geared for a marketing department whose CMO is Tinker Bell. And Ms. Bell must be in a bit of a rut, because she keeps touting the same solutions to all the world’s marketing problems.
For instance, “Anyone can use social media to build their brand – any brand -- into a powerhouse.” Oh, yeah? Start tweeting about Hardrock natural-gas nipples and see if anyone shows up but the crowd from outside FAO Schwanz.
Or here’s another one: “The key to effective marketing is to turn your best customers into brand evangelists.” Really? If a guy buys a million cubic yards of black dirt from me he’s going to become an Al Sharpton of my black dirt, and he’s going to tell all his competitors, who would disembowel him as much as look at him, to buy my black dirt, and they’re actually going to do it? Maybe if they’re just coming off of an acid trip, but otherwise they’re going to tell Rev. Al what he can do with his black dirt, and it’s going to be a stretch to fit a million cubic yards of topsoil in there.
Either that or the solutions sound like they were taken from that Monty Python sketch on how to rid the world of all known diseases: “Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvellous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be any diseases ever again.” I can make a lot of marketing problems disappear by throwing a million dollars at them, but I guarantee the mill will disappear faster than the problem.
Where’s the real-world stuff – besides here, of course? Well, no matter, because it’s here and it’s going to stay here.
Now here’s a real real-world question: When is the right time to start from scratch?
You know what I mean. The workaday marketing challenges have nothing to do with the launch of an epochal new product, backed by barcode scans and mobile ads and celebrity appearances and product placement on Regis and Kelly and pre-rolls on YouTube and Super Bowl ads and ooh look skywriting. Instead, they’re questions like, “How do I communicate this subtle product change to a niche audience using the least amount of time and money?”
The easiest way is to rely on the past. If you communicated the change from a 1/8-inch flange to a 3/16-inch flange using a modified sell-sheet and an e-mail blast, chances are you can communicate the change from a ¾-inch washer to a 25/32-inch washer the same way. You can probably even use the same sell-sheet and e-mail templates. The world will forgive you for not hiring Cameron Diaz to get this point across.
However, overreliance on this tactic is a trap. If you treat nothing as truly special and new, eventually your audiences will get the idea that there is nothing special and new about you, that you are the K mart of your particular market and you deserve the K mart treatment, which ranges between derisive scorn and leper-like screaming avoidance. Unless chocolate-covered cherries are on sale.
The answer to this question is obviously somewhere between never reinventing and constantly reinventing, but the real answer is tied in with the answer to this rhetorical question: If you don’t believe in your product, how can you expect the outside world to believe?
I was the defacto marketing department for a company trying to build its cash coffers in advance of an IPO. As a green-grabbing tactic it was flooding the market with products that, in Dave Barry’s immortal words, were “clearly an industrial prank. It was all the people on the assembly line could do to not shoot rivets into each other, they were laughing so hard.”
When we rolled out the latest batch of sheet-iron one-liners to the sales force with all the straight faces and go-get-‘em enthusiasm we could muster on a weekly retainer, we were greeted with a universal message: “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Only they didn’t say “kidding.”
The products were worse than molybdenum on a stick. We knew it, but we had to put give them to the sales force anyway. The sales force knew it, and they had to put on their best sales face (i.e., lie) and tell their customers that these were the best thing since chocolate-covered bacon on a stick.
You can only ask your sales force to sell (i.e., lie) so much, and this was too much. This was lying of an immense scale not seen since the ads in this morning’s local newscast. Though the spirit was willing the flesh was weak, the products tanked, the company filed Chapter 11, and we moved on to a different weekly retainer called unemployment.
I’m not saying that none of this would have happened if the sales force had believed the howling mongrels we gave them were presents from Santa. I’m saying you need to market to maximize everyone’s belief in what you’re marketing.
So the answer to the question is a question: When do you reinvent the wheel? When it’s necessary for everyone to believe that this product or change or report or brochure really is special and important.
Let’s be honest: If you make embroidery floss, there’s not a lot that you can do to your product to make it more special and important, unless you put a vial of KISS blood in every red dye-lot. The status quo will probably do just fine.
However, there will come a time when sales have plateaued and enthusiasm likewise and you need to give the product a kick in the slats. That’s the time to put on the creativity hat, reach for the magic wand (I have one at my desk – doesn’t everyone?) and change things around.
Similarly, there are a number of reports I produce every year. They’re basic research that outlines our market, its demographics and competitors.
For four years I used one basic format for the reports, and things trucked along swimmingly. No one had any complaints, nor would they have if I had replaced all content back of the table of contents with plain paper.
This year I totally redid the format and went the extra step of replacing all content back of the table of contents with plain paper. And you should have heard the complements roll in.
Obviously, the crack about replacing content with plain paper is a lie – rather, a sales tool. But the rest is true. The content of the reports changed only in the sense that there was less of it. In the delightful phrase coined by the auto industry, the reports were decontented. However, they looked much more special and were treated that way by their audience.
There are many legitimate reasons for letting the status quo rule: time, money, marketing objectives, sales goals, even inertia. Understanding when those are no longer reasonable excuses requires sensitivity to organizational culture and external needs. Good marketers are doing that already.
The real marketing world is about nothing so much as decisions. What gets the attention, and what goes begging? The good news is that if you didn’t before, you now know the questions to ask to make your decisions. Now, good luck explaining that to your boss.
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