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Mark Stevens says your marketing sucks Mark Stevens doesn't like to mince words. Just take a look at the title of his bestselling book: "Your Marketing Sucks". But Mark's views aren't as radical as his title suggests; in fact, they're just plain common sense-- even a Clio-award winning advertisement is absolutely useless if it doesn't increase your bottom line.
Marketing, it seems, has merely become a buzzword for throwing more and more money at fancy ads and flashy websites. If you're like most businesses, you've probably watched that line item in your budget growing exponentially every year. We're told that good marketing is the key to success, and more often than not, it is insinuated that "good" marketing means "expensive" marketing.
Not so, argues Stevens. In fact, he recommends a complete moratorium on marketing so that businesses will take the time to review their strategies and find out if all that money they're investing is actually bringing money back to the company. That is, after all, the point of marketing. We recently had an opportunity to speak with Mark about the myths of marketing, and how understanding them-- and understanding marketing-- will help us create strategies that not only promote our business, but truly build it. I´d like to start by hitting on a couple of these marketing myths, which I think are dead on. The first one is something I know everyone believes is true. "Doing any marketing at all is better than doing nothing." Doing any marketing at all, and that means marketing that doesn´t equate to a return on your investment, such as a brochure that costs thousand dollars to produce and generated no revenue, was that better than doing nothing? No. Doing nothing would have been better because you would have had ten thousand dollars in your pocket that you could have invested in some other part of your business. Now, marketing is critical to the growth of your business. It´s not just some addendum thing that you should consider whether or not you want to do it. You can´t grow a business without it. You need some sort of marketing to grow a business, and the best way to employ marketing is to employ it in an integrated sense. But nobody said you had to spend a lot of money. The reason you´re interviewing me is because of a book, which is on Newsweek´s bestseller list and is already about to go into its third printing, and not a dime was spent on it. It made the bestseller list all through guerilla marketing. And that´s a huge and important thing to consider-- that marketing doesn´t always equate to spending huge sums of money. No, in fact I think there can be an inverse relationship. Often, the more money you spend, the less productive it is. You can´t throw dollars at an issue; you have to throw ideas and execution at an issue. One of the most powerful forces that many businesses aren´t tapping into is the Web, the Internet. Not a website-- most websites don´t do anything. They should be closed down. Not necessarily forever, but for right now. I call them cold sites; they don´t help the business, and they do no good for anyone. People built them at – often at considerable expense, they´ll refresh them next year for more expense, and they don´t really know why they´re doing it. Someone just told them they " had to have a website". When we ask these people if they get business from it, the answer is always no. They´re like millions of cold planets floating around in cyberspace that do nothing except absorb dollars. So I suggest people should just shut them down, and if any of your customers complain, ask them what they would like the site to do. If no one even notices that the web site is no longer there… You should only have a web site if it will do something, and that something is to grab a visitor, get them to give you their information so you can go back and sell them something, or sell them something right on the site. Someone once said to me that `most businesses are organized the way they´re organized because that´s how they´re organized.´ And most people do their marketing the way they do their marketing because that´s how they do their marketing. In some cases, you´ll find the third generation of owners doing the same thing as their grandfathers did in terms of implementing a marketing structure. The good news is that it keeps them on people´s radar, but the people whose radars they´re on are the people they´re already doing business with. Many of them aren´t employing any strategies to leverage their legacy or their brand beyond the same people they´re doing business with. Often, a company´s founder will be the type who´s a natural born marketer. He or she is a person who knew how to stand out in front of the company and get business. They were a great hunter and they knew how to go out and close a deal. If they didn´t, they wouldn´t be in business. That skill is not necessarily transferable to the next generations. It doesn´t necessarily have to be, but you have to have someone out in front that can do that. It doesn´t even necessarily have to be a person; it can be a strategy or a process. It can be a web strategy or a direct mail strategy; it could be an email strategy or advertising, or, best of all, a combination of those. That´s why most family businesses die after the second or third generation, because the original customers die and because the natural marketing ability of the founder hasn´t transferred to the next generation. I´ve seen this happen to people who were good, solid businessmen and women, but that ability to open your door in the morning and go out and get people to buy something just hasn´t carried over. That has to be either replicated either by someone else in the company who has that gift, or compensated for by using intelligent marketing. Most of your readers aren´t marketing. What they´re doing is creating a brochure or building a website. That´s not marketing. Doing public relations that turns out press clippings? That´s not marketing. They´re spending money on marketing, but they´re not marketing. They´re just doing stuff that costs money, and that´s not marketing. Marketing is building a business, and marketing is not about spending money. You often do have to spend some money at some point and you build on it. The reason I used my book as an example is not because I wrote it. I use it to demonstrate a point. The book came out July 15th 2003, and in the first week it´s out I get interviewed by Reuters. It goes across web feeds and newspapers around the world, and it didn´t cost me anything. It shoots up from number 4,000 on the Amazon.com rankings to 87 in one day. And it didn´t cost anything. That´s marketing. And then, we get into web sites and web channels and web communities…more PR… speaking engagements…I have twenty-one speaking engagements in the 4th quarter of 2003. These don´t cost anything if the places that ask you to speak pay for your travel. Now we´ve gotten into the publisher advertising, in the Wall Street Journal which started on the 30th of September, but that´s already after the book has built up steam because it´s a best-seller and we´re going to take that momentum and blow it further up the list. So it all fits together, and your readers need to recognize that they´re doing themselves a disservice with ineffective marketing - because every dollar they take out of their pockets (as opposed to a giant business where there´s a corporate treasury) comes out of money that they could use for their kids´ education, a new car, a vacation… it´s their money: are they going to waste it, or are they going to use it to grow the company? One of the other myths you refer to is the confusion between advertising and marketing. They´re not the same. Typically, we´ve just done advertising. We´ve taken out Yellow Pages ads or we sponsor the local football team or NASCAR racer or and that´s a direct cost right off the bottom line. And in a family business, there´s the additional issue that the older generation, Mom and Dad who are retired in Orlando, are often resistant to using their money, as they see it, to experiment with new types of marketing. They don´t understand why the Yellow Pages ad and the athletic sponsorship aren´t enough when it has worked in the past. So they don´t venture into new territory, they continue using their old advertising techniques, yet no one who has ever spoken to me about these things has ever given me any sense that they were even tracking the results. They´re not. I ask people all the time how their adverting is going and they´ll say "oh, it works for us." I ask how they know. "Oh, well, sometimes someone will bring an ad in and say `I saw your company in the magazine/newspaper/TV ad.´" And I say, great! How often does that happen? And they don´t know. Or they´ll say "Well, it happened a couple of times." This happens all the time. We have a retail client, a family business, that was spending ,000 a year on advertising for twelve stores around the country. We looked at his advertising, we asked some questions, and we found that it was producing nothing, it was terribly designed from a strategic standpoint, it was a mess. We ordered them to stop all advertising. You tell a retailer to stop advertising and they´ll look at you like you´ve got 9 heads! But they listened to us, they stopped the ads, and for nine months they had virtually no advertising, which gave us time to find out the dynamics of the business and what the message was for that business. We went back to the first cable TV advertising they had ever done and tested it in one store, so instead of dropping $50,000 in a wasteland, we spent $5,000 to test something in a new advertising medium, and they´re having a record year. They just called us recently to tell us they had the biggest single day in their twenty-year history. So, you see that the argument that to do some advertising is better than no advertisement is false. In some cases, it´s better to wait, hold a marketing moratorium until you´ve figured out what you want to do and do it right. Let´s get back to mom and pop in Orlando. When they call, what they really want to know is, is the business growing? The best way to have a peaceful relationship with the folks in Orlando is to grow the business, because if you´re growing the business, they´ll leave you alone. They have a legitimate right to want to grow the business, but they often give the business to someone who isn´t as skilled as they were. Hope springs eternal. But the older, more skilled generation can help the next, less skilled generation by guiding them and encouraging them to intelligently use marketing. Take a look at Coca-Cola. When you think about it, it´s pretty dumb-- a bunch of syrup and some water-- and you see that it´s the product of great marketing. Coke wasn´t always Coke. Once upon a time it was just some dumb drink that no one had ever heard of. Now it´s a global icon. So marketing does work, and it doesn´t need to start with a million-dollar ad market. We all know that executives and CEOs are often isolated, professionally and even geographically. They can feel that they´ve got no one to talk to or to trust. They don´t have anyone to go to for advice. For a lot of business leaders, this isn´t just perception, it´s reality. One of the things they do is join self-directed peer groups. Let´s say you don´t have a marketing department. There may be six or ten decision makers in the company, and they all have to really take the reins. You decide to get together with some of your contemporaries, around the country or around the neighborhood. Is there a way to use Your Marketing Sucks as a resource to help these folks brainstorm together to create an ad hoc marketing group? One of the things I advocate in my book and on my weblog is a marketing moratorium. It would be a great idea for the peer group to hold that together and act as a support group, because it´s going to be like going cold turkey because a lot of these people are marketaholics-- they´re just buying marketing and chugging it down, not knowing what they´re getting except maybe some false high because they like how their ads look in the newspaper and their faces look on television. If they act as a support group and they all say ok, we´re going to stop for a week and not do any marketing, everything we have we´re going to put on hold, and we´re going to get together and ask ourselves the questions that are in this book:
We get inured to these things over time, so let´s all challenge together, as a group, these things that have been beaten into our heads and maybe as a group bring in a marketing consultant or someone who has really built a successful business through strong marketing, and let that person be the facilitator of the group. If we all stop spending this ridiculous money for a while everyone will be the richer for it and everyone will grow their businesses better. Let´s look at these questions together and have the nerve to stop together. I wouldn´t ask each other for marketing ideas because you´ll generate too many ideas and it´ll be too confusing, and each business is too different. I´m not a big believer in going around asking everyone their ideas, because I feel that a business person has to make a decision, get in front of it and live it. I think using the book as a guide is beneficial because it allows you to examine your practices and get something real, tangible, measurable. You can go back, make some changes, and measure the results three months later, six months later, a year later and see how you need to fine-tune. You may decide to meet quarterly and see how everyone´s doing. We do that with all of our clients-- we have a quarterly retreat. We never start marketing with a client unless they have a retreat with us. They come in for a day, we dig under the business and find out what´s going on. We don´t just immediately start making brochures. We ask `why is this business growing? And if it´s growing, how can we make it grow faster? If it´s declining, how can we turn it around? What´s missing? What are you not seeing?´ That´s where marketing should start. Not with a website, not with a color palate, not with a logo, not with a brand. It should start with business ideas. You had said early in the conversation how business people should use the web. You feel strongly that just having a website is often useless. Can you expand on that? There are communities on the web talking together every day, and your customers are in those communities. Let´s say that you sell trade show booths. Every day on the web there are trade show planners talking to each other in various web communities. If you have a new idea about how trade shows and booths should be done to make them more effective, if you have a better methodology, then get into that channel of discussion among the community of trade show planners, and also to the chief executives of smaller companies, because a lot of your readers go to trade shows who will spend ,000 to go to a show and they don´t get anything back for it. They don´t send a salesperson to the show, they don´t have pre-show communication or post-show communication, they just go to go. That´s what the trade show business is in America-- going down to Vegas for a few days, collecting a few business cards and having a good time. No one ever comes back from a trade show saying `we got a lot of business,´ they come back saying `we had a great time!´ Everyone loves to have a party, but you can´t really sell anything to a drunk partygoer. Getting into these channels where people are talking to each other professionally in these web communities doesn´t cost anything. So get in there and bring your ideas into that world and they´ll start paying attention to you. And then they´ll come to your website, which should have something to offer them-- maybe a guide with 10 different ways to improve a trade show booth. Then you´ll have their email address and their contact information. They´ve learned something from you and they see you as a value-adding provider. You´ve used the power of the Internet to bring the world to your door, and you didn´t need a big fancy website or anything else other than to go out and proactively feed the community. The web community wants ideas. It doesn´t want self-promotion; it wants ideas it can gravitate to. So put in the harder work of thinking about some way you can enrich the thinking about what you sell or what service you provide, and let the web do what it does best, which is to spread information. You mentioned that you have a weblog. Is spreading information the purpose of it? Absolutely. The web is a very important element in growing my company and selling my book, just like my book is an important element in growing my company. The two are interrelated. People read who read the book go to the website and see that there´s a connection between the website and what I espouse in the book and they call and hire us. Right now I don´t have to sell. The world is coming to me.
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