Feeling Driven to Marketing is Not Being Market-Driven

Are you driven to marketing? This is not the same as being market-driven.

Do you hate marketing your products and company? If you feel that you’d rather have all your teeth extracted than do anything with marketing, you could hate being “marketing driven”. You’re not alone. Most of our clients (except the advertising and marketing companies) don’t say “Whoopee, I get to come up with and implement my inbound or outbound marketing”. 

Why you might hate being marketing driven

Maybe you hate the marketing process.It’s too complicated and you can’t get “real” work done.

Maybe you hate writing or trying to be creative. How in the heck do you come up with a guaranteed winning slogan like Coca Cola’s “It’s the real thing”®, Nike’s “Just do it”®,  Ever Ready Battery’s “It keeps going, and going, and going”® or Geico’s line that is so famous they feel they can just tell us “you know”? These are all big companies with big budgets to spend on marketing slogans, memes and other fun stuff.

Maybe you see marketing (and sales) as a big lie, encouraging people to buy what they don’t need and can’t afford.

Maybe it drives your crazy and you wish it would just all go away or someone else would do it so you could do your more important jobs:

• run your company,
• create, produce, and deliver the best products and services,
• provide wonderful customer service.

Your job really is to make a company that works and is viable and profitable. It’s not to do the work, find the work, or administer it. That means marketing is inevitable, like death and taxes. You are driven to marketing — sometimes kicking and screaming — because you have no choice.

I cringe, too, sometimes. I want to throw something when I hear marketing people say something like “people don’t know what they want, you have to convince them”.

That makes me think of Steve Jobs quote about marketing: “I end up not buying a lot of things, because I find them ridiculous.” (The Independent, 2005) That’s ok. Marketing can work to help people decide what’s right for them.

Maybe this is the real issue for most owners: fear of failure when it comes to marketing. There is no guarantee — even if it’s required by law — that everyone will buy something. Just look at how many people drive without a license or insurance.

If you’ve been in business for awhile at some time you will hear (hopefully in a nice way), “I don’t want to spend my time and money with you”. This is actualgood for you to hear because you can concentrate on marketing to those who do want you.

How can you cope with the necessary evil of being driven to marketing?

You can be stoic and just do it. The problem is that can be how your marketing comes across and how you present it — staid and stoically. I’ve seen companies whose sales people and owners almost choked on their words when they had to “market”.

These marketing “truths” with a small “t” may not help you, but they have helped others. They will give you something to think about.

• Marketing makes people aware of an opportunity to buy — then it’s their choice.
• Good marketing helps people “see” what it might be like to use that company without buying it blind.
• Effective marketing, like an effective sales process, knows that it’s “ridiculous” to want to sell the same thing to everyone. We’re all different. There’s no silver bullet of words, images, endorsements, sounds, etc. that will affect all people and get us to buy.

That said, if you know your Platinum Profile™ customer’s wants and needs and design your marketing specifically for them, you will succeed. It will take work, time and some money. It will require: a strategy, system, staff training, delivery process, tracking, evaluating, and adjusting. You can’t just sit back and relax. If you know what it takes, you don’t have to get overwhelmed and feel as if you were driving a team of wild horses that were out of  control.

Marketing-Driven is Being Customer-Driven

In the end, it should be your preferred most valuable Platinum Profile ™ customer that drives you to marketing. Your marketing efforts and your suggestive selling efforts will be appreciated because you are helping them improve their life and the lives of others they care about.

The next time being marketing driven gets to you, remember this quote from Jobs “Marketing is about values” which “never change”. You might even want to watch his speech at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keCwRdbwNQY.