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The Magic Marketing Myth

04/09/2009

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It may sound heretical coming from someone who spends his life researching, doing and writing about marketing, but much of what marketers promise is hype; overstated, unrealistic, baseless puff that not only wastes money but squanders the opportunity of solving the real business problem. This is a pretty big claim to make, so let me back it up with some sort of rationale, which I think comes in three parts.

Firstly, most marketing promises are about what marketing communications can do. Be it the modern promise of search engine optimisation or the more traditional assurance that the double whammy of advertising and sales promotion will crush the competition, marketers mostly promise to spend money. In return, they pledge that the returns will be worth it (although they rarely back that up with data). But in all my 30-something years in business, I've never seen marketing communications be the answer, or even most of the answer. The reason for this lies in the second two points of my argument.

My second point is that most marketing communications effort is wholly disproportionate to the task in hand. Rarely, it spends far too much, more often far too little. Either way, money is wasted through overkill or failure. The usual reason for this is that most marketing communications campaigns start with a set budget based on what’s affordable or the traditional “last year plus something”” formula.  Almost never does marketing begin with an assessment of the task and work backwards to the resources needed. This isn’t because it’s difficult – tools and formulas exist to allow pretty good estimates – it is because many marketers are too lazy, ignorant or self-serving to do the job properly.

That second reason might suggest that properly resourced marketing communications will deliver the marketers’ promises, but my final point dashes even that hope. Marketing communications, you see, is the tip of the arrow/the icing on the cake or whatever metaphor you want for something that only works as part of a greater whole. That greater whole is marketing strategy (note, not marketing communications strategy) which I define as that set of management decisions about which market segments to serve and how to create value for them.

Marketing strategy, which doesn’t involve the sexy creative stuff but focuses on segmentation, targeting and positioning , is really difficult to make and even harder to implement well. It’s neither a creative art nor an exact science, but a hard-nosed technology based on difficult sciences like psychology, sociology and economics. The implications of this harsh reality is that marketing strategy is rarely done well and, consequently, most marketing communications campaigns are cathedrals built on sand.

Is my message one of unrelieved despair? Should we cancel our marketing budgets and just add it to the bottom line? No, because we know that leads to a short-term blip followed by long, inexorable, commercial decline. The answer is to divert some time and money from marketing communications to the foundations of marketing strategy so that even the pared-down marketing spend is a steel tipped, well aimed spear thrown with just the right amount of force. That’s the way to do marketing. Just don’t expect it to be easy.

 

Dr Brian D Smith
Dr Brian D Smith is a researcher, author and advisor in competitive strategy. He welcomes comments and questions on brian.smith@pragmedic.com