Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

October 27, 2008

Getting the Marketing Right

By Andrew R. Thomas


During an average day, the typical American is subjected to over 3,000 marketing messages. Assume eight hours for sleep and personal hygiene, this leaves 16 hours to be inundated with pitches, sales, discounts, solicitations, and offers. This translates to over 180 per hour. Or, more than three per minute!
 
Even worse, most of it is not even relevant to the people who are being molested. In a recent study, nearly 80 per cent of Americans felt “constantly bombarded” by radio and TV advertisements, billboards, pop-up ads, telemarketing calls, junk mail, spam, etc. Equally disheartening, more than
two-thirds say that all of this “noise” has little or nothing in common with them.
 
In our personal lives, to fend the marketers off, we spend more and more time trying to get away from them. We surf the TV channels the moment commercials appear. We open our mail over the waste-basket, ready to throw away the junk pieces. We delete spam from our inbox and we enable the “block pop up” feature on our Web browser. We consciously and subconsciously fight the attachment of marketing messages to everything. Yet, it feels like we cannot win. We cannot free ourselves from the grip of the marketers.
 
Paradoxically, for many of us in our professional lives, we design campaigns with the goal of flooding the market with more and more messages that promote our products and services. We wrongly assume that we can be immune from the noise. That somehow —almost metaphysically — our message can cut through everyone else’s and reach our target audience. But if people are fed up with being bombarded by more and more marketing messages every day, how can businesses honestly believe that traditional approaches can do anything except come up short? 
 
If we get right down to it, we feel trapped. Unable to move by what is occurring on two levels: first, it is harder to draw a crowd these days and, without a crowd, you have no place into which to cast your messages. And, second despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we still hold to the old metrics of reach and frequency, believing they are the pathway to success.
 
When trying to understand the root causes of this malfunction, five mistakes seem to be more common and influential than any others:
 
1.      It is wrongly believed that simply more customers and more sales mark the road to profitability.
 
2.      There is a wrong embrace of the shotgun approach. That is, if enough marketing dollars are against the wall, a certain amount will stick, which will transform themselves into customers, profits, and market share.
 
3.      A wrong belief that almost everyone wants to hear from them. In fact, very few actually want to tune into an advertisement or receive a brochure, etc.
 
4.      The search for magic bullets. There is often a wrong assumption in place that there exist one or two magical ways for a firm to find and keep their best customers.
 
5.      Discounting the importance of process. The fad in much business thinking today is that the time-consuming — and often dull — basics of effective campaigns can be pushed aside in favor of “cutting edge” approaches to marketing.
 
In my forthcoming columns, we will examine these mistakes in greater detail and together explore how to break away from the herd mentality that so often dominates marketing strategy today. As Mark Twain said, “When you find yourself in the majority, pause and reflect.”
 
Andrew R. Thomas is Assistant Professor of Marketing and International Business and Associate Director of the Taylor Institute for Direct Marketing at the University of Akron.
 



Edited by Greg Galitzine


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