Quotes about Marketing

Mass marketing doesn't always create mass appeal and mass appeal can't always be marketed.

Some companies have trained their sales associates to tell you that their fragrances are so pricey because they use a high proportion of natural ingredients, perhaps even all natural ingredients, perhaps gathered in rustic baskets among hillsides of heather and clover by barefoot virgin tonsured monks clad in brown burlap while they pray for your soul, as they have done since the late Cretaceous. But there are really very few perfumes you could honestly call all-natural.

Question: What is an example of company that created a brand by conducting a dialogue with customers?

Answer: You don’t know many either, do you Guy? Ahh, we agree! I think that while markets are conversations, marketing is a story. Starbucks creates conversations among customers, so does Apple. The NYSE makes a fortune permitting people to interact with each other. But great marketing is storytelling, and if you’ve been to a Broadway show lately, you’ll notice that audience participation is discouraged. That doesn’t mean that great playwrights don’t listen! They do. They, like great marketers, listen relentlessly. They engage in offline conversations constantly. They poll and they do censuses and most important, they have true conversations with small groups of real people. But THEN, they tell a story.

If a newspaper, a radio station or a TV station doesn't please advertisers, it disappears. It exists to make you (the marketer) happy.

That's the reason the medium (and its rules) exist. To please the advertisers.

But the Net is different.

It wasn't invented by business people, and it doesn't exist to help your company make money.

It's entirely possible it could be used that way, but it doesn't owe you anything. The question to ask isn't, "but how does this help me?" as if you have some sort of say in the matter. You don't get a vote on whether Google succeeds or whether your customers erect spam filters.

The question to ask is, "how are people (the people I need to reach, interact with and tell stories to) going to use this new power and how can I help them achieve their goals?"

At the end of the day, great advertising is just like great moviemaking. No great research has ever made a movie; no great research has ever made a television show. You can tweak things, see if something is working a certain way, so yes, research can test "Is this communicating what I think it communicates?" You might think it does, but if 20 people say, "I don't get it," well, you've got to pay attention to that. But you can't listen if 20 people go, "I think it's this" or "You should do this" or "I like this." The best creative products—and this goes for television programming also, this goes for news organizations—use research appropriately and intelligently, but give me that great gut every time. And that's what separates the men from the boys.

If you understand women's consumer DNA and implement strategies that ring with authenticity, you will improve all of your marketing efforts. If you make it women-friendly, you make it everybody-friendly.

Branding is no longer for Fortune 500 companies and Madison Avenue agencies with excessive budgets and inadequate tracking.

Personal branding is about managing your name — even if you don’t own a business — in a world of misinformation, disinformation, and semi-permanent Google records.

Going on a date? Chances are that your “blind” date has Googled your name.

Going to a job interview? Ditto.

Marketing needs to define what sustainability means for their company and then decide how to express those values in their offerings. Companies should stop trying to appeal to green consumers by building green myths into the products they have and start creating something real—products that tell their environmental story for them.

I think that while markets are conversations, marketing is a story. Starbucks creates conversations among customers, so does Apple. The NYSE makes a fortune permitting people to interact with each other. But great marketing is storytelling, and if you’ve been to a Broadway show lately, you’ll notice that audience participation is discouraged. That doesn’t mean that great playwrights don’t listen! They do. They, like great marketers, listen relentlessly. They engage in offline conversations constantly. They poll and they do censuses and most important, they have true conversations with small groups of real people. But THEN, they tell a story.

Don't underestimate the value people place on authenticity. Politicians listen to the focus groups and say the things they think people want to hear. But after 30 years of reading consumers, I know that they can smell phonies.

We're living in a world now where consumers are bombarded with thousands of commercial messages - they're everywhere you look. Unless you can cut through that and engage someone, I think you are lost. Consumers are now clearly in control. They control what they hear and see, when, and where. You have to find ways to allow them to actively engage with you, or the money you spend is wasted.

Relationships with the media are really important. The media has a more important voice today than it has ever had. We don't advertise. We only have one marketing vehicle, which is editorial, and our ability to get our message out and communicate it effectively.

Face it. The customer service of our fathers’ days, like my father’s little full-service station, is long gone and it’s not coming back.  Customer service should now be thought of as the customer experience department, and its mandate should be to purposefully and tenaciously help the organization design the best darn customer experience possible.  Customer service is, in fact, dead.  Long live the customer experience!

Clarity should be the guiding principle behind every marketing effort. Clearness of thought. Clearness of appearance. Clearness of message. Clarity should inform every campaign, drive every question, and  rationalize every dollar spent and every piece of data captured and analyzed. Whether you’re launching a large scale branding effort, producing an event, or simply crafting an email message, follow these two steps to marketing clarity:

1. Discover. Ask yourself; are we truly clear about how to create superior value such that customers  are continuously attracted to us? And by value, I mean the qualities that render your product or  service highly desirable by your audience. It may be performance value, financial value, time value, entertainment value, identity value, or some combination. Note: Market research rarely reveals new insights into value creation.

2. Execute. Now that you understand how to create superior value, you must clearly and precisely align all spending and activities to both communicate and deliver that value. Note: If you can’t find the value in an activity, it does not exist.

Winston Churchill said that appetite was the most important thing about education. Leadership guru Warren Bennis says he wants to be remembered as 'curious to the end.' David Ogilvy contends that the greatest ad copywriters are marked by an insatiable curiosity 'about every subject under the sun.'

The one truth about word of mouth is that the truth always rises to the surface. The truth about your company, products, services, and people is all that matters now.

Mass marketing may be going the way of the dinosaur, but we would never suggest the principle of branding is on its deathbed. The need to establish and sustain name recognition and associative benefits will always be part of the competent marketer's stock in trade. However, the complex and interconnected relationships between emerging media and the information they now make available mean that name recognition and associations alone are insufficient. Increasingly, customers are associating brand not with a message but with their entire experience surrounding the product or service.

In other words, branding is now more about what you do than what you say.

Cats don't bark—and consumers today don't "salivate on command" like they seemed to a couple of decades ago. Consumers today behave more like cats than Pavlov's pooch. Times have changed—and so must we.

Eternity waits for your release. It dawned on Enoch that all signs, all advertisements, with all their strategic marketing phrases, still had a beauty that came before and beyond the madness of taking the power of the words and using it to sell some product, some thing. The words may have been selling something, but they were still beautiful words that spoke some other truth. Enoch felt his heart quicken its pace at the understanding, the fresh insight, realizing that he could learn from that commercial world that had always scared his soul. The world was alive and speaking out to those who would listen, and it spoke spiritual even in its containment of the external...
~ Chad Christopher Cobb, "The Sea of Milk" ~

Marketing by interrupting people isn't cost-effective anymore. You can't afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing messages, in large groups, and hope that some will send you money.

Instead, the future belongs to the marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk.

Traditional sales and marketing involves increasing market shares, which means selling as much of your product as you can to as many customers as possible. One-to-one marketing involves driving for a share of customer, which means ensuring that each individual customer who buys your product buys more product, buys only your brand, and is happy using your product instead of another to solve his problem. The true, current value of any one customer is a function of the customer's future purchases, across all the product lines, brands, and services offered by you.

WHERE DOES trust come from?

This is what every marketer wants to know. Without trust, marketers know that there are no sales. Trust means the prospect believes not only that the product being sold will actually solve his problems, but that if for some reason it doesn't, the company will make good on its reputation of performance.

We happily pay a premium to buy our jewelry from a fancy store instead of from a shady character on the street. Why? Because we trust the store to sell us the real deal, while the guy with the watches in a briefcase represents substantial risks.

Corporations pay consultants billions of dollars for their advice, when they could probably find similar advice down the street at the local community college. Why the premium? Because Bain and McKinsey and the like are trusted advisers. They've built enough of a track record, and enough confidence, that they can command substantial premium.

The other way to get married is a lot more fun, a lot more rational, and a lot more successful. It's called dating.

A Permission Marketer goes on a date. If it goes well, the two of them go on another date. And then another. Until, after ten or twelve dates, both sides can really communicate with each other about their needs and desires. After twenty dates they meet each other's families. Finally, after three or four months of dating, the Permission Marketer proposes marriage.

Permission Marketing is just like dating. It turns stranger into friends and friends into lifetime customers. Many of the rules of dating apply, and so do many of the benefits.

Almost no one goes home eagerly anticipating junk mail in their mailbox. Almost no one read People magazine for the ads. Almost no one looks forward to a three-minute commercial interruption on must see TV.

Advertising is not why we pay attention. Yet marketers must make us pay attention for the ads to work. If they don't interrupt our train of thought by planting some sort of seed in our conscious or subconscious, the ads fail. Wasted money. If an ad falls in the forest and no one notices, there is no ad.

A business exists because the consumer is willing to pay you his money. You run a business to satisfy the consumer. That isn't marketing. That goes way beyond marketing.

No great marketing decisions have ever been made on quantitative data.

And that's the real incentive, isn't it? It's not so much the fact that you get to bask in their God's love that's the selling point, it's that you avoid damnation. Think of it like Coke putting out an ad that says 'Snapple causes muscle spasms, Pepsi is infected with AIDS, and tap-water gives you cancer. So drink Coke. Not only do we taste good, we're the only alternative to pain and suffering.' It's actually a pretty good marketing tool. Humanity, by nature, is an ambivalent animal, given to fits of inertia, and we're more than likely to sit on our noncommittal behinds unless there's a bogeyman to chase us out of our chairs.

When Donald Trump was asked recently what he would do if he had it to do all over again, his matter-of-fact, one-line reply was: "I would get into network marketing."

The ultimate compliment a customer can make to an organization about one of its marketing people is: "I'm not sure whether your sales rep works for me or for you."

The future of network marketing is unlimited. There's no end in sight. It will continue to grow because better people are getting into it . . . soon, it will be one of the most respected business methods in the world.