The measurement of marketing effectiveness is just as difficult. Short-term sales increases due to promotional gimmicks are often matched with equivalent declines in sales in the next time period.
Marketing managers commonly confuse coincidence with cause and effect. They get “lucky” once in their career with a strategy or tactic and seek to repeat it. The result is a career of frustration in not being able to relive the “lucky moment.”
The science of statistics provides methods for identifying whether what we are observing is a random event or a statistically reproducible finding. Through disciplined analysis, we can identify scientific principles to guide our everyday thinking and decision-making.
MEANINGFUL MARKETING VS. MINDLESS MARKETING
At the Eureka! Ranch, our “religion” is something we call Meaningful Marketing. Meaningful Marketing is about honest storytelling. It’s about telling with absolute accuracy how your offering will make a meaningful difference in customers’ lives.
Sadly, a quick review of modern advertising finds that Meaningfulness in communications is a rarity. Instead of respecting a customer’s intelligence through communicating real news, most advertising attempts to coerce customers using what we at the Eureka! Ranch call Mindless Marketing.
Mindless Marketing is about using persuasion trickery to sell your offering. It’s about encouraging customers to make a purchase without conscious thought or consideration.
When a celebrity is paid to use a product to persuade gullible youth to buy, that’s Mindless Marketing. When a credit card company offers no interest for 90 days, then raises its rates to loan shark-like levels, that’s Mindless Marketing. When a company pays to have its brand shown in a television show, that’s Mindless Marketing. When a company gives free gifts to consumers to get them to create “buzz” about their product, that’s Mindless Marketing.
The search for “Persuasion Tricks” is nothing new. In 1983 advertising legend David Ogilvy wrote in Ogilvy on Advertising of the never-ending desire of the media and the advertising community to find the latest “hot marketing trend.”
There have always been noisy lunatics on the fringes of the advertising business. Their stock-in-trade includes ethnic humor, eccentric art direction, contempt for research, and their self-proclaimed genius. They are seldom found out, because they gravitate to the kind of clients who, bamboozled by their rhetoric, do not hold them responsible for sales results. Their campaigns find favor at cocktail parties…. In the days when I specialized in posh campaigns for The New Yorker, I was the hero of this coterie, but when I graduated to advertising in mass media and wrote a book which extolled the value of research, I became its devil. I comfort myself with the reflection that I have sold more merchandise than all of them put together.
Both Meaningful Marketing and Mindless Marketing can be successful in the short term. The difference between the two lies in longer-term success rates and profitability. Research shows that Meaningful Marketing initiatives are twice as likely to succeed in the marketplace long term and five times less likely to be vulnerable to pricing pressures.
In short, Meaningful Marketing enables you to sell more with less investment of your time and money. Mindless Marketing requires that you sell your product at a lower price, spend more on promotion and advertising repetitions, and hope for a Pavlovian response from customers.
A comprehensive discussion of the differences between Meaningful Marketing and Mindless Marketing can be found in Chapter 6. I’ve placed it near the back of the book, as the discussion is somewhat theoretical, and I wanted the Scientific Advice and Practical Ideas to be up front. In today’s overstressed world, many marketers just don’t have the time to read theory. They want ANSWERS, and THEY WANT THEM NOW. Feel free to read this chapter out of order if you’re interested in having a deeper understanding of the theory before exploring the tactics.
HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED
Jump Start Your MARKETING Brain uses a unique two-page format. The left-hand page details a piece of Scientific Advice, its essence distilled into a single sentence at the top of the page. Dr. Deming said, “A goal without a method is nonsense.” So to reduce my chances of writing a book of nonsense, I’ve placed a collection of Practical Ideas on the right-hand page, specific ideas for applying the Scientific Advice to your sales and marketing challenges. I’ve purposely provided an overabundance of suggestions to guarantee that you’ll find ideas to help you no matter what your situation.
The advice and ideas are clustered into chapters.
Chapter 1: Marketing Strategy: Marketing Strategy myths and misconceptions are exposed and NEW SYSTEMS of strategic thinking are detailed in this extensive review of what really drives marketing success.
Chapter 2: Marketing Message: The focus here is on how to create more Meaningful Marketing Messages—the kinds of marketing messages that generate significant, sustained success in the marketplace.
Chapter 3: Mindless Marketing: Here you will find a collection of Persuasion Tricks that are very effective at persuading customers to do that which they don’t consciously choose to do. Just understand that customers who come to you mindlessly will also leave just as mindlessly. In effect, you are basically renting customers. This chapter comes between the “Marketing Message” and “Selling” chapters as the advice and ideas apply to both disciplines.
Chapter 4: Selling: This chapter provides advice, ideas, and ammunition to help the front-line warriors increase their return on every hour they spend. In the case of small-and medium-sized businesses, the same person often does both marketing and sales. That said, I recommend that even when you do hold both roles, you think of them as distinct tasks. The thinking systems that drive success in marketing are separate from those that drive selling success.
Chapter 5: Leadership & Teamwork: Advice and ideas to inspire you and your team.
Chapter 6: Meaningful Marketing vs. Mindless
Marketing: The last chapter defines the differences between Meaningful Marketing Messages and Mindless Marketing Persuasion Tricks.
Technical Appendix: For those who get as excited as I do about data, here’s an overload of technical references, discussion, and documentation.
WARNING: This book could OVERWHELM YOU. It’s a DEEP DIVE into the complex world of sales and marketing. It’s for those with a genuine commitment to measurably improving their success rate.
If you’re not really passionate about marketing or are not truly committed, then you should stop here and take the book back to where you got it. The first book in this series, Jump Start Your BUSINESS Brain, provides a simpler, bigger-picture view of how to measurably improve your marketing and innovation success rates.
YOU ARE GUARANTEED TO WIN MORE THAN YOU LOSE
As Ben Franklin once said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” The truths detailed on these pages are proven probabilities. They are not black-and-white certainties. They have been proven statistically and, to me, beyond a reasonable doubt. However, while they are widely applicable, they are not universally applicable. There will be situations in which they are irrelevant or just don’t apply.
Then, too, even truths with high statistical odds are not certainties. For a weather forecast of 80 percent chance of rain to be statistically correct, it