What is marketing about?
In my last edition of this book I said marketing was about the art of seduction. In a way I wish I hadn’t done so because I made it all sound a bit too tabloid. Marketing is more serious than that, and these are serious times. Marketing is about the skilful art of creating and building relationships between a brand or a company and its consumers, customers and stakeholders.
Marketing is about the art of informing and persuading. It’s about creating conversations. It’s about maximising the effectiveness and the efficiency of achieving sales. It lies at the very heart of any business. In a company of any scale, that company will fail if the CEO isn’t constantly attuned to and in control of its marketing.
In a small company or a start-up the reason a company fails is likely to be one of three:
- inferior product
- cash flow problems
- poor marketing.
When marketing really works you know it – sales go up, share goes up, research tells you that it’s working, you get write-ups in marketing magazines and there’s a buzz about. But it’s also fun because marketing deals with what makes people tick. And what is more fun than being with and relating to people?
The world has changed. So marketing has to as well.
Still the most potent words you’ll see in-store are ‘new improved’, which means good old values but better performance. That’s what this book is … new, improved. And that’s what all brilliant marketing needs to be.
Marketing is at the centre of the commercial stage as everyone realises that the chase for sales growth or, perhaps more realistically, business survival is something brilliant marketers who really understand their trade customers and their end consumers can achieve and no one else can.
To keep up with the ‘new improved’ brilliant marketing you have to not just have your finger on the pulse of the modern world, you have to tightly embrace the changes within it:
- Innovation is expected the whole time – same-old, same-old will die.
- New technology is a friend – use it, don’t be in awe of it.
- There are specific demographic segments of key interest – Generations Y and Z; the young-elderly; the leading-edge colourful thinkers.
- Embrace psychographics – what sort of people are you targeting? What turns them on (and off)?
- Consumers are getting smarter, so be innovative in the way you talk to them.
- If you aren’t being creative and exciting you deserve to fail.
Whether you are already in marketing (or thinking about it) or are intrigued by the subject as an outsider, welcome to the strong alcohol of ‘brilliant marketing’. Marketing is a fuel that can really transform things. Let’s start by looking at some great stories to see just how enthralling marketing can be.
Marketing stories – gather round, people
I love my Apple
Apple was nearly bust a decade ago. And then Steve Jobs who’d founded the company and had been ousted returned. He diagnosed the problems. Apple had a long, dull product line, terrible logistics and was a challenger brand whose biggest enemy was itself. Michael Dell actually thought Apple should shut down, it was that bad. Jobs shortened the line radically, insisted the products became ‘sexy’, launched the living poster sites of Apple Stores and went on a crazy crusade of relentless improvement. As an astute marketer who never used research to tell him what people would like, Jobs understood that he was in the consumer appliance business, not the computer business. He made people around him do simple things brilliantly. Apple is a legend as a leader of markets that never stops trying to do it better – or faster – or lighter – or brighter. When Jobs said to John Sculley (then at Pepsico) ‘Do you want to spend your life selling sugared water or do you want to try and change the world?’ he was showing himself to be a great salesman and a visionary. Apple actually has changed the world.
Happy cows. Great ice cream.
The launch of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (now owned by Walls, a division of Unilever) had great PR – we all knew that it was owned, and that the various tastes were created, by the eponymous couple of rebels with long beards, both with hippy attitudes and both lovers of organic food. The product design was fun and exciting and not corporate in feel. The philosophy was encapsulated by an advertisement on the London Underground that proclaimed ‘Mission statement: To make nice ice cream’. What more can you say? How great to ridicule ‘mission statements’. And they are still having fun with the brand, declaring on their web site their adherence to ‘peace, love and ice cream’ and in their crusade to create a ‘caring dairy, milking happy cows, not the planet’. Rock on!
Marketing makes me smile
I like shopping. I like new products. I love quirky stuff. I love the National Trust doorstop that is a life-size hare. I love Hotel Chocolat’s Chilli Chocolate. I love the storage boxes in Selfridges that are each decorated with a different pantone colour. I love Rymans … all those useful office things.
And I love the Google logo: colourful, three-dimensional, and through Dennis Hwang’s Google Doodles it is topical too. The ‘doodles’ are the inventive way he plays with the logo on special anniversaries so you have the sense that the brand is constantly being refreshed.
I suppose I’m a marketing junkie but in truth isn’t the enthusiasm of marketing precisely what makes New York, Hong Kong or Borough Market so exciting? Give me a busy street full of shops trying new stuff rather than any museum or art gallery.
There isn’t time NOT to be brilliant at marketing
Many people seem to feel too busy to even try and be brilliant nowadays. If a deadline is more important than the quality of what is done by that deadline we are doomed. Despite the improvements in technology we have less time than ever. All executives are on 24/7/365 with smartphones. We simply have to find time to be more creative if we want to shine in marketing. This is not just a skillset thing, it’s a mindset thing too. We have to find ways of maximising the stimuli to creative brilliance. As Maurice (now Lord) Saatchi said:
‘Creativity is the last legal way to gain an unfair advantage.’
This book is a manifesto for brilliance, the kind of brilliance that comes from an intuitive leap that all brilliant marketers make in working out how to get their target consumers to do and think something they otherwise wouldn’t have thought about or done. Brilliant marketing is that magic stuff, the ideas, the actions and the campaigns that make a real difference.
This is not, finally, a textbook. It is not a business book either, although it is about business.
It’s a thriller, pure and simple.