Marketing Sucks, Long Live Marketing
If you are skeptical of marketing, we don’t blame you one bit. Marketing is a messy business, and not that many people are good at it.
It’s easy to spend a lot of money on marketing with precious little to show for it. And there’s no shortage of people or platforms ready to swipe your credit card at a moment's notice.
First of all, humans have free will. When marketing is legitimately expensive, it usually seeks to convince a customer to do something they were not going to do otherwise. That just isn’t going to be cheap. Changing minds isn’t fast or easy.
When marketing is cheap, it usually seeks to convince a consumer to do something they were already going to do, but perhaps sooner or more frequently. It’s useful to understand at the outset which of these two buckets you fall into.
Second, most marketing sucks. Advertising in particular really sucks. When something works 3 times out of 100 and that’s what kicking ass looks like, you know something is wrong. Being wrong that much is costly to everyone involved, customers most of all.
Third, it’s crazy competitive out there today. Customers have myriad options across myriad channels. Loyalty rates are low, our culture is fickle, and anxiety runs high.
In this newsletter, I’ll try to help you win at marketing anyway, but take solace in the fact that if it feels hard, that’s because it 100% is.
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At my firm JDI, we make precedent-setting science companies well known and understood. Learn more at: www.jones-dilworth.com