Marketing is Not the Answer

It's always the easy answer, though.

When a product doesn't perform, perhaps it's not being marketed to the right people. When sales takes a dip after six consecutive quarters of growth, marketing is asked to come up with a fresh campaign, because the previous messaging is now stale. When customer complaints about a product rise, marketing is asked to create collateral to help explain the product in a better fashion.

It's easy to do. A problem arises, and you think of the easiest solution possible, that ruffles the least amount of feathers, causes the least amount of distress in the organisation and is essentially the path of least resistance. It doesn't matter if it's the right solution or not. Because when someone asks what you're doing about the problem, you have an answer at hand.

More often than not - the solution to a business problem is not marketing. In fact, it seldom is. Most often, it's operations. It's process. It's competition. It's the industry. It's changing consumer needs. But pointing problems to those factors causes a lot of discomfort, and makes organisations feel very uneasy.

If your product isn't performing well, perhaps it's because your competitor just has a better product. No amount of marketing is going to change that situation. If your service isn't getting the kind of requests it used to six months ago, it's not your communications that have gone stale, perhaps it's because there's a more innovative solution available in the market that has made your service, essentially useless.

But who's going to deliver that news? Who will stand up and say - our service is hereby useless, and unless we do something drastic, we're going out of business in four months. It's much easier to say - we need a new marketing campaign to talk about the great features of our service that people are missing out on.

Saying that however, comes at a huge cost. You sink budget for no reason into a marketing campaign that you know will not work, you waste time working on the marketing rather than figuring out a business solution, and by the time you've rolled out the marketing, which is pointless by the way, your competition has advanced a further five steps.

By taking the coward's path, by not wanting to ruffle feathers, by not calling a spade a spade, you've essentially dug an even deeper hole for the organisation, all because no one was willing to say that the product or service are to blame, and they need changing.

Sometimes marketing is the problem. Most of the time, it's not. The most expensive thing you can do with marketing isn't blowing a multi-million dollar budget, it's blaming it for poor business performance and making it your focal point of innovation.