Book Summary Preview : Your Marketing Sucks

The Big Idea
If every dollar that you spend on marketing isn't generating more than that amount, then your marketing sucks. You might as well throw away thousand-dollar bills in spending on marketing. So says author Mark Stevens, creator of the Extreme Marketing process.

Extreme Marketing is based on the premise that you know why and what you are spending for in marketing. In other words, your spending is in context with specific goals. There should be a plan that makes every marketing tactic reinforce the other. What gets back must be more than what you spend.

Why your marketing sucks
Consider the following scenarios:

• Car and truck manufacturers spend fortunes to produce beautiful commercials. Everyone remembers the scenery and the stunning visuals. But who remembers the car or the truck?
• An ad wins in the Oscar of the advertising agency, the Clio. All is well and good for the ad agency. But sales don't pick up. Where does that leave the company that commissioned the ad campaign in the first place?
• A company spends $100,000 for a perfect dot.com name, but less than a tenth of that amount for website design. In the process, it turns away potential customers who find it difficult to navigate the website or find that “hot merchandise” that is being promoted.

IThese are examples of marketing that sucks. Most marketing “sucks” for the following reasons:

• Many companies don't understand what marketing is. One company spent more than a million dollars for 10,000 copies of a beautiful brochure, only to keep them warehoused in the end. The reason? The brochures were too expensive to give away to just about anyone.
• Companies operate by generalities. An expert says that a 1% hit rate for direct mail marketing is good enough. And companies limit themselves by this adage, if it is true at all.
• Many companies undertake only one form of marketing, such as print advertising, instead of a swarming offense that targets everyone wherever that person turns, from print ads to outdoor advertising to infomercials.
• Many expensive programs are devoid of innovative thinking. They're hung up on doing what their competitors do, but better. In the end, no one remembers. The key lies in innovation, in being remembered.
• Many companies don't make use of available research. There are databases that can be accessed to enhance the marketing effort.
• Many marketing professionals remain unaccountable for results or the lack of them. Consider this case of a major IT company. The person responsible for producing a magazine-cum-catalog that didn't even generate enough revenue to cover its cost because the idea was poorly executed, was rewarded with a promotion. The “mag-a-log” itself was great. But because the company had no way of selling to customers directly, except only through an “authorized representative”, it cost them more than what it had brought in. A person who should have been fired was instead promoted.

It's all about moving what you sell. Forget Clio's. They won't sell your product or service. Advertisements should do one thing-- to sell.

If they aren't doing that, then your marketing sucks.

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