Inside Marketing

Who's Out There Anyway?

Marketing has always been about reaching the right people  It the olden days, gosh -- what ... 12 years ago?--  it was still about mass marketing -- reaching the masses.  Then, along came Pepper & Rogers (t and everything was about 1:1. Get to one person at at time with a personalized message and make them feel special.  Was Rogers related to Mr. Rogers perchance? I think not. That Rogers cared about neighborhoods.

 Soon thereafter came Seth Godin with permission marketing.... even if you personalized the message you'd better make sure you had permission to talk to the person. It's kind of the Victorian version of marketing -- speak only when you're spoken to.

And now, we have social media -- which is probably as anti-social as you can get.  It's not personal, most people have pseudonyms or pseudo-pictures (also known as avatars) and the game is again about numbers (i.e. how many followers do you have on Twitter?).  Never mind that half my followers are people I never heard of and people who shouldn't want to follow me, but are hoping against hope that I'll follow them back.  It's reverse mass marketing!

This is what hasn't changed in marketing over the years.  It's all about people.  Sometimes we call them targets, sometimes audience.  More recently, we call them community,(there's that Mr. Rogers thing again), but unless some people out there care about our message, product, company, cause -- our marketing has truly fallen on deaf ears.  

Here's the real marketing question:  Whom do you want to reach?  Whom do you want to care about you?  Those are the people you need to account for in your marketing efforts. And without knowing your target, you don't have a marketing plan at all.

~ Rhona Bronson

Procrastination is Marketing

Procrastination is good for marketing.  It may not seem so at first glance, but if you delve deeper, you'll see it's so.  Marketing people are usually manic, running around getting things done and meeting deadlines, so they are not generally considered procrastinators.  But, here's the truth: Great marketers do procrastinate.

If you're a fan of CBS Sunday Morning you may have seen the Fast Draw team.  They do illustrations of difficult concepts to help enlighten us visual learners about whatever they feel is important. On Sunday, April 12, they illustrated the concept of procrastination.  Here's what I learned:  the word is derived from Latin where pro means "forward" and crastinus means "belonging to tomorrow." 

Marketing is about looking towards tomorrow.  If you wait to think about marketing until a product is done, it's too late. Great marketing occurs early in the process long before the next product, service or great idea is a reality. Marketing believes that tomorrow will come as will the great next thing, and to be ready for it --  we must dream more about and prepare for tomorrow, or procrastinate.

If you ask most marketing people why they never get to the important stuff, it's because they're busy meeting a tight deadline today.  They are getting things done rather than determining what needs to be done to better position a company.  Now, this post may seem directly opposed to my previous post "Active Tense,"  but it's not.  In that post, I noted that Marketing is about getting something done.  The real key, however, is to think and plan and do the best thing. 

Notice I didn't say the "right thing."  If you wait too long to determine the right thing, you may not do anything at all.  That's not procrastination, which implies you'll do it just later. That's downright quitting and doing nothing. Unfortunately, that's the state of most small business marketing.  Instead, consider procrastinating and having a marketing team, plan and program in place and working within the next three months. You'll be happy you did and you'll be amazed at what the future may look like.

~ Rhona Bronson