February 13, 2003
Marketing Techniques
In the comments of my entry on MLM, Damon writes:Philosophically, I have a real problem with Sales and Marketing. That's the irony of being a marketer. I don't like the fact that advertising and marketing creates ... nothing. No ingenuity, no magic, no brick & mortar. Yet, there has to be some mechanism to evangelize new products to people who haven't seen them before in order to grow business, grow economies, and perhaps, change someone's life a little bit. To date, I haven't met a better system than traditional marketing.
That's what gets me brainstormy. Let's look at it in three ways.
A product that fills a hole in the market; an existing need This is the fun stuff, I think the kind of product development and marketing that is most closely tied to innovation and invention. Someone notices a glaring need and imagines a stunning solution for it - they create the solution, it's obvious to others that it solves it, they want it.
A product that fills absolutely no pre-existing need Like Chocolate Coated Sugar Bombs. You manufacture the need through input overload and emotional manipulation. I hate that stuff. I'm susceptible to it sometimes.
The in-between stuff. :) Like, an accountant. You can do your own taxes and you might find it stupid to pay extra money to help you do something where you'll already be paying money, but then you realize you've reached a point where the money you'd spend on them is less than the money you save by using them. Or, I'm a software contractor. There might be clients out there that are content with what they do but don't realize that by using my services, they will get greater utility that will actually save them bottom-line money even after paying me. That kind of marketing isn't a clear need beforehand, but it's business education.
So, the problem is that it's a spectrum. That third option is on a sliding scale between the above two extremes. Someone can bring up another product or marketing effort and they can ask me where it is, and really it would just be my opinion. Which invites a lot of opportunity for rationalization. ("Everyone's entitled to their opinion," code for "Your opinion is stupid and irrelevant.")
Where was I going with this? Oh yeah. Marketing. A "mechanism to evangelize new products to people who haven't seen them before in order to [...] change someone's life". I think there isn't a system for this. At its nut, it requires essence in the person practicing it. As soon as the personal touch is taken out of it, I think it knocks itself out of the "personal plus" column. Honest helpful marketing is a desire to serve first, profit second? All right, I'll try that one on.
Posted by Curt at February 13, 2003 12:22 AM