Business Executives hate marketing.
Most have not really tried to understand it. They just know instinctively “if they don’t prime the pump, the pump stops working”.
And for many decades priming the pump meant developing tons of new product, advertising in a smart and creative way, ensuring the product works and is available in the right places, while pricing it so the target will buy. It is not surprising that many business people confuse “marketing” with “promotion” - which is just one of the 4 Ps of marketing as defined by McCarthy and Kotler, as this is the “P” we can touch, see and feel.
People cannot buy a product or service they don’t even know exists - and truth be told, they don’t care until marketing influences them.
The challenge most marketers have faced for decades has not changed: how do you create sticky awareness? People buy what they know or what is stuck in front of them when they are in the market. In most situations, today’s marketers are kidding themselves, thinking they can “create” demand by trying to interact with the prospects every step of the way.
Therein lies the rub. These 2 paradigms that influences people and cause sales are diametrically opposed.
Establishing a clear brand position and doing everything necessary to have the prospect consider your product at the time of purchase has many moving parts. Collectively these moving parts are called “marketing”. All activity is designed to build a relationship and make the prospect think you are wonderful. When it is time to buy they remember their favourites and, all things being equal, buy your brand.
On the other hand, after 25 years of digital marketing, we are beginning to understand the mess we have made. We used a powerful new opportunity to desperately chase a sale - at all costs.
We gave organized crime a whole new revenue source. There are more clicks per minute, every day, than there are people on the planet. Clicks are in the Trillions. Population is still in the single digit Billions. The internet rewards clicks. Bots can click a lot more than humans. Organized crime has billions of bots working full-time to collect .01 cents per click. The math is easy AND for the most part this is “legal” or at least, very difficult to detect and enforce.
We created a humungous Marketing Technology sector (MarTech) whose primary reason to exist is to make marketers think they cannot live without them. Check out chiefmartec.com (and these numbers are more than 4 years old) - https://chiefmartec.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/marketing-technology-landscape-2019-slide.jpg
And, during this same era, we gave agencies a new role: steal from your naive client using programmatic media buying. “Just put your money in this black box and voila! We give you a bunch of mis-leading, unimportant numbers that can help you convince management that their investment in marketing is working.” I exaggerate to make the point - but not by much!
Add social media to mix where every Tom, Dick and Mary has a mega-phone telling you how to get more clicks (note, I did not say make more honest money). I am constantly amazed at the sheer number of talking heads on LinkedIn promising to transform my business. None of them know anything about my business.
The real difficulty is many brands are fully vested in Digital, which for the most part is the opposite to brand building. One shamelessly begs for sales and annoys the customer; the other does its best to please them so they will buy when they are ready.
I have a very simple theory about this. Marketing is about managing your brand piggy bank. You are either putting a chip in, or you are using a chip to try to close a sale. If you close at every opportunity, you have an empty piggy bank and the brand is in danger of becoming obsolete. So the next time you come up with a new tactic, ask yourself “Am I contributing to the brand or annoying/frustrating my prospect?”
