The marketing technocrats are the second biggest danger to your entrepreneurial business success. You are the first.

The marketing technocrats are the second biggest danger

to your entrepreneurial business success.

You are the first.

I remember my first days as NOKIA VP of Marketing for the Israeli market. I came to NOKIA after more than 18 years of executive marketing positions with leading brands and multimillion dollar budgets.

It was my first meeting with my internet manager - a new role in the marketing team. She looked at her reports and said: there were 335 thousand youth and young people viewing our last campaign.

As I said, eighteen years a marketing manager and VP for leading brands, spent millions of dollars on different marketing activities and ads, but I had never known exactly how many people actually saw the campaigns.

 

The internet, Google, and social media have completely changed marketing and any interaction with our and customers.

It was the beginning of a new marketing era. When we stopped pushing information and messages, interrupting people to push our message, and instead started drawing our likely customers to us

This was a huge revolution in marketing. That completely changes not only the way we interact with our potential and existing customers, but also our ability to measure and track our audience responses.

 

However, like any revolution, new risks and threats arrive hand in hand with progress.

Step by step, a new generation of digital marketers began to destroy all the advantages that enabled businesses to achieve far better and more plentiful successes. 

In an excellent post Mark Schaefer, one of the most significant marketing influencers today, wrote:

“One of the themes of my writing this year is how marketing is deteriorating into a glorified IT function. Instead of considering the wants and needs of customers, companies are over-automating marketing to the point of constant consumer annoyance.”

In another post, Mark Schaefer wrote:

“There are many research reports concluding that consumers LOATHE pop-up ads. At this point, there is no rational marketing professional who can believe that people like these annoying ads.

But if you ask a marketer why they do it, they say, “because they work.”

But people hate them.

 

You see, the greatest thing about marketing as apposed to the sales only approach, is that marketing allows us to understand who the potential customers are and what their needs and desires are.

As I always say in my lectures: The definition of marketing is looking at things from the point of view of our potential customers, because the money we want, lies in their pockets.

 

A new generation of marketers came aboard: the technocrats. Those who deal with numbers, automation, and AB testing, and don’t understand that AB testing doesn’t help us if the customers are not the right ones and the messages are wrong.

The biggest danger to your entrepreneurial business success isn’t about counting on the wrong marketers.

It’s about not understanding what are they doing wrong about and allowing them to run off your only assets: your customers.

It’s not only about the wrong marketers. It’s about you.

 

In my previous two posts I wrote about The Eight Golden Rules Of Entrepreneurial Marketing.

The first four rules are about finding the answers that will allow you to win the market by doing the smarter things earlier.

In this first part of the post, we defined the four most basic rules at the heart of customer focused market strategy. Any marketing success we have builds upon those basic rules.

Here are the first four Golden Rules of Your Entrepreneurial Business Success:

  1. Identify the primary and secondary customers you need to focus on at all stages of the product’s life cycle.
  2. Define your product from the customer’s perspective.
  3. Find the category the product needs to play in according to market behavior.
  4. Find the value that will motivate the customer to purchase the product.

To learn more about the Eight Golden Rules Of Entrepreneurial Marketing, click here

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