It’s possible to know everything about marketing techniques, strategies and tools and still be a marketing imbecile.
If you don’t understand what makes people tick, you don’t have much going for you. Marketing is about people, not methods. When business people miss this fact, the marketing they produce is usually pretty fragile. Always in danger of falling apart. Susceptible to defeat in the face of opposition or competition.
Fragile marketing is all around us. Here are 4 major symptoms — do your communications suffer from any of them?
1) Price-based messages are fragile
Unless you have no mailbox, TV or internet, you’ve probably seen dozens of advertisements for Black Friday “doorbuster” sales. Doorbusters take urgency to the extreme, offering uber-low prices to drive traffic to stores (or to a lesser extent, websites).
Don’t get me wrong; everyone loves a good deal. But consider the position you put yourself in when you put all your eggs in the low price basket. You have to be cheaper than Walmart. You have to compete with the preponderance of their commercials, too. Is that really the contest you want to participate in?
While this is true all year ’round, consumers (at least here in America) are practically programmed to shop at big box retailers for Black Friday and other commercialized holidays. The retailers spend millions of dollars broadcasting their bottom-basement prices to your customers. The deck is stacked against you.
Remedy
No matter what you sell, if you don’t a) offer something unique, b) make a more persuasive appeal, or c) develop a special relationship with your customers, you lose…
Discover 3 eading “Fragile Marketing: Recognize the Symptoms” on the Chicago Brander blog:
Much thanks to Dan Gershenson for letting my guest blog!