Why Sometimes Marketing Fail

No matter how many people you will ask around you to define the exact meaning or definition of the word “marketing”, you will always get more and more different views about it. Almost no 2 people can agree on the same marketing angle.

In 1964, a phrase was famously used by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for pornography,
“I know it when I see it“.

With no hesitation or doubt, I can add to this: “I know this is marketing with I see it and feel it”.

If few agree on the definition of marketing, lots of brands and/or marketing manager try to apply what they have learned in books or go strictly by the textbook definition and end up failing. Unfortunately some ignorant and pretending people stayed behind and missed catching the fast train of how marketing evolved during the past few years.

Social Media
Till the moment I am writing this blog post, some marketeers in this world, still don’t believe that social media is a useful tool to help marketing or promoting a brand and unfortunately, in case they get convinced somehow, they think that setting up a Facebook page or a Twitter account will do the job for them and they stupidly think a YouTube video can go viral just like that, without preparing the field.
They have no clue that if the brand does not talk or engage with its consumers, no matter the tool you are using, it is useless.

Don’t Talk Bullshit
Picking your words is important, the message itself also. Try to be honest when marketing your brand, be fair to your consumers, treat them honestly. Good word-of-mouth did never bad to a brand, your fans can spread the positive image in no time and for free. It will only cost you some transparency. Have a company or brand blog and let people read about what you think and let them share their thoughts.

Metrics & Analytics
No matter how much money you spend on your marketing campaigns, and you are not smart enough to measure your efforts and learn from your mistakes, then you barely can maximize your ROI. Some marketeers have no idea that such measuring tools exist and if they know, they don’t appreciate their real value and how helpful they are and how far they can take them on the ever evolving super marketing highway. With total accuracy: “You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure”.

Crowdsourcing
This is maybe better known as focus groups to some. Most of marketeers neglect and underestimate the power of “social answers”, because they are afraid of negative vibes that consumers can bring to their brand. While big corporations start crowdsourcing internally until they take it to the outside world, some others don’t do it even inside their companies and if they do it, they do it the wrong way and don’t even use any collaboration tools to bring teams together and be productive.

Even this looks very odd and unusual at the end of this post, an old client of mine once said: “all marketing managers, male and female, should be screwed”.