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CRAYONS! This post started with a flashback to crayons and a former colleague referring to marketing as ‘colouring in’.
While this perception of marketing amongst in Ireland is diminishing, it’s still not an isolated belief. In my experience, there tends to be a limited understanding of what marketing actually entails amongst leadership in small to medium businesses. Their focus tends to be on product or operational excellence, rather than becoming a marketing expert. This might be a shrewd decision but to ignore marketing completely has to prove costly over time.
Marketing is often conflated with aggressive selling too — over-exuberant Americanised commercialisation — which causes discomfort for our deep-rooted cultural modesty.
“Ah sure, you can’t be at that kinda craic, talking yourself up! Getting notions.”
This attitude often sees marketing relegated to the last throw of the dice for SMEs in Ireland. When all else fails, try a bit of marketing and when that doesn’t work, it was marketings fault all along!
“Sure, throw up a few posts on Facebook there,” is the clarion call of the desperate business owner who sees revenue shrinking and can’t grasp why.
The Facebook posts might yield and underwhelming result which reinforces this belief that “marketing doesn’t work“. Marketing, it seems, is supposed to prove itself as a standalone event rather than a continuous effort.
Sound familiar? Below I look at some of the most common misconceptions about marketing and try to dispel these myths with actual examples.
Marketing can be expensive but it’s rarely comparable to the cost of not marketing, which can result in poor visibility, slow growth and terminal decline. Nimble marketing strategies using organic content, Search Engine Optimisation, email marketing and collaborative partnerships can be extremely cost effective allowing your business time to build a war chest for more expansive (and maybe more expensive) marketing campaigns.
Guerilla marketing is another low-cost option, such tactics preceded the whole idea of ‘going viral’ and involves unconventional, creative tactics to grab attention and generate a buzz. One famous example of guerilla marketing involved ‘The Blair Witch Project” movie which grossed around $250m at the Box Office by starting out by posting a ‘Missing Person’ to online horror forums. The successful output came at a marketing cost of a tiny percentage of gross revenue. There may be ethical eyebrow raising at this point, but the success is undeniable.
This is true in certain instances e.g. WhatsApp didn’t require much in terms of marketing spend to dominate the messaging app domain but great brands (think Apple, Coca-Cola, Dyson etc.) are built on strong marketing. Your business may be doing just fine without a marketing strategy, but imagine what it might look like if it had one?
Even the best ideas can get lost without visibility, positioning and the right sales strategy. One famous example of a marketing failure is the Sony Betamax video cassette record marketing botch job. (“What’s a cassette Grandpa?”) In the mid-1970’s Sony failed in their distribution strategy and also failed to explain the value of their superior quality product.
Sony co-founder Akio Morita said famously at the time:
“We don’t believe in market research for a new product unknown to the public…so we never do any. We are the experts.”
This lack of marketing foresight allowed JVC’s licensed VHS product to dominate the market with a more consumer-friendly and mass-produced alternative which dominated the mass-market and B2B market through convenience, availability and affordability.
“Here’s a genius invention, market it successfully or you are a failure!” Over to you marketing department, don’t mess up all of our hard work!
This is a killer marketing misconception. The idea that innovation and product development happens first in a bubble of creativity and once the product is complete, it’s the marketers job to make it an attractive prospect. This may work but there’s a better way.
Marketing should be involved from the outset through research, design, testing. This early stage involvement also improves the focus of the marketing message later down the track.
My favourite tool, Slack was borne out of a failed online gaming company called Glitch, thanks largely to marketing insights. They repositioned to develop their internal messaging tool as a new way of working — the email killer — and Slack was eventually acquired by Salesforce in 2021 for $28bn. Marketing works!
Advertising is a subset of marketing. The belief that advertising is all of marketing is a symptom of short-term thinking which leads to wasted spend. The sad reality is that novice DIY marketers prove that marketing doesn’t work by doing it badly.
Relying solely on advertising as your marketing strategy can be effective but eventually your target audience builds a level of immunity to your ads and awareness trails off.
The craziest thing about it is, I’ve seen businesses respond to failing advertising strategies by increasing their ad spend, on the same strategy. Bonkers.
Marketing is an end-to-end strategic effort starting with understanding your customer, shaping perception, nurturing opportunities and fostering loyalty. In a competitive landscape, narrowing your focus to just advertising will have limited success in the long-run.
“Marketing is just a few creative types colouring,” one colleague from accounting once told me. True story. This attitude to marketing illustrates why the marketing budget is often the first thing cut when funds are constrained (e.g. during a recession). If anything, the reverse should be happening.
For Coca-Cola for example, marketing is often described as a “core capability” and a non-negotiable investment. They famously doubled marketing spend during the Great Depression and grew in the last recession thanks to a fresh approach to marketing.
In reality, every touchpoint a customer has with a business is marketing. Each interaction influences perception and the whole team needs to ‘get it’ in terms of understanding the brand, the tone of voice and the desired experience for the customer. Otherwise, the customers trust in the brand starts to fragment and eventually comes apart.
Good marketing isn’t just a set of dials that are reactively tweaked to turn on the flow of sales opportunities. It’s not a colouring competition either :-). If only it were so simple!
Marketing is distinctively different for every business. It’s the way your business thinks uniquely about delivering value to your target customer. It’s less “what can I sell them” and more “what can I do to address their needs?” When executed correctly the marketing strategy should act as a constant support the sales effort ensuring consistent long-term growth.
Ditch the misconceptions. Invest in marketing, even starting small if you are on a limited budget, just start.
