Marketing - Great Expectations?

I recently went to a trade show where several potential customers were exhibiting. I met up with the business partner of one such prospect who was manning the stand, to be met with the dead-pan and seriously meant statement that ‘marketing doesn’t work’. What on earth then, I asked, are you doing here? Clearly that was the right question to ask as we have had a couple of sensible conversations since.

The difference between marketing and selling is simply that with selling, you are communicating one-to-one, and with marketing you are relying on your outgoing messaging. Because the communication is one way, as it were, the marketer has no idea how said messaging is being received: is the target impressed with our offering? Do they have the available budget to buy yet? And, most importantly, where in the buying cycle are they? I’ve said this before, and it’s worth saying again in this context, that if I could tell any client that this advertisement in that medium at this time for that rate would generate this many leads at that conversion rate for this amount of profit, then I would have sold such a provable formula to a huge corporation and retired to the beach a long time ago. Sales two- way, marketing one-way. Simple.

Let’s do the logic. Look at the cars on the road, the shops on the high street, and the banks alongside them, the supermarkets in the retail parks – malls are American – the white goods in the home, the ads on the television. This is marketing, all one way, and ruthlessly effective. The marketers behind these successful enterprises know about buying cycles, but they also have invested in a campaign that allows them to be patient in the knowledge that buying cycles come around. The only conclusion, therefore, is that marketing can only work if it’s done properly. It’s not the strong that survive, but it’s the organisations with the strong messaging.