Your Marketing Sucks

Yes, that's right. It does. That is according to Mark Stevens, author of 'Your Marketing Sucks'. Now this is a book I think I'll have to read. He's basically saying that most advertising out there is a pointless pursuit of a Clio at the expense of the advertiser's money.

"If you have an advertising agency that applies for any kind of award - Clios, whatever - fire them immediately," urges Stevens, president of Westchester based MSCO, a full-service marketing firm. "If they talk about building 'mind share', fire them immediately as well. That's just another way of saying they'll camouflage their failure to generate sales behind an intellectual smoke screen."

He does have appoint. It does seem like so much everything in the ad business is about winning awards. That's great but we put way too much emphasis on it. I have been through countless new business pitches where we reel off a list of awards we have won. But, these are awards for the creativity of the ad not for increasing the clients bottom line. Does it matter if the ad was creative or well liked? Or does it matter if sold product? That is the point of Stevens' book.

He defines marketing as activities that build your business. He's right. Why do anything unless it is going to build your business? Advertising is a subset of marketing. It's supposed to "position" the advertisers company. To make the consumer "feel" a certain way about a product. He claims most advertising does that but does nothing to support the marketing effort of increasing the bottom line. He may be onto something if we still can't answer that famous question about not knowing which half of your advertising is working.

So who does Stevens think is doing marketing the right way? "I think that the people who work on Madison Avenue need to go and look at infomercials once a month," he claims.

Infomercials do move product. Is an infomercial marketing or is it advertising? Or is it sales? Should an ad campaign sell a product or set the market up to be receptive to sales efforts? Are Marketing, sales and advertising separate entities or are they one? One thing's for sure. There's a whole lot of money being spent on advertising and there's a whole lot of company's in bad financial straights. Something isn't right.

I haven't read the book so I don't have the whole story. Any book with a title with this one is bound to attract attention whether there is meat to it or not. Has anyone read it? Does anyone have an opinion on this? Please comment.

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