Spreading the Ideas that Matter to You

Or Why I Work in Marketing

Consumers often see marketers as soulless people trying to sell them things.

A mental image of a telemarketer selling marked up exercise equipment or big brands splashing millions on pointless marketing campaigns pop up in people’s minds when you announce that you work in marketing. (A bit awkward, that. I always diffuse the situation with a forced laugh and start talking about the weather. But if I had time, I would tell them what I’m going to tell you in this post.)

Marketing goes deeper than a profit-oriented industry, bloated claims and unnecessary upsells. These things exist and they suck. But strip the word of all negative connotations and all you have left is a way to spread ideas.

What Happens to Ideas that Aren’t Marketed?

Not all awesome ideas spread on their own. There’s no Darwinism in the marketing world where only the best ideas survive and go on to spawn even better ideas that then grow up to think that the parent ideas are lame.

There were countless possibilities behind Nikola Tesla’s idea for wireless energy transmission, but no one understood or wanted to market that idea. Tesla had an exceptional mind and he was one of the greatest inventors of all time, but he lacked business acumen.

If only Tesla had the means and the skill to spread his idea to more visionary investors, we’d probably be enjoying cheap, wireless electricity right now. But we’re still dreaming of charging our laptops and mobile phones through thin air over long distances.

Brilliant ideas get lost when they’re not marketed.

An example of something that did make it is sliced bread. You can put together a tuna sandwich with pre-sliced bread today because Otto Frederick Rohwedder’s bread slicing and wrapping machine (which was widely considered a failure at the time) was adopted and marketed by Wonder Bread.

So yeah. Enjoy that sandwich while you lug around your laptop charger.

How People/Companies Got Their Ideas to Spread

The evolution of marketing has a simple path when you look at the big picture. In the pre-industrial era, there was no such thing as mass marketing because people bartered or traded commodities within their communities or with neighbouring places.

What we really want to get our claws into is the post-industrial era when all the exciting stuff started to happen.

Stage 1: Telling everyone to buy stuff

When goods were being mass-produced, one of the biggest advantages was obviously, lower costs. Sales people used printed advertisements, magazines and posters as long back as the 15th century, and even now billboards, radio, television and telephones are being used to push products to people . This is called outbound marketing.

Supply and demand were skewed because more and more branded goods came to the market vying for the same consumers. So selling the goods was based on how one product was perceived to be better than the others. Most marketing efforts at this time were spent trying to reach as many people as possible with greatly exaggerated pitches to outdo the competition. (Hello, dubious claims about mouthwash saving your relationship and weight-reducing soaps.)

Stage 2: Telling specific people to buy stuff

Around the 1950’s and 60’s, sales was augmented by marketing departments.

Marketing decided how to position a product, whom to target and how to advertise. This is good because consumers were finally free from being considered a homogenous blob of humanity with the same needs, dreams, wants and tastes.

David Ogilvy is popularly known as the ‘father of advertising’, but it was also Ogilvy who started the movement towards informative direct marketing. In one of the first ads he created in 1951, he introduced the stout beer, Guinness, to American customers. Ogilvy was always a fan of giving customers as much information as possible, but in this case he didn’t tell them about Guinness.

He gave them a wealth of information about…

Oysters.

Oysters are a classic food pairing with stout and this unconventional insight into the market helped him appeal to oyster lovers to try a Guinness the next time they ordered the dish. ‘The Guinness Guide to Oysters’ was a huge success and Ogilvy paved the way for marketing teams to research niche segments and cater to them specifically.

On the downside, companies were still using interruption marketing tactics like TV ads and telemarketing.

Stage 3: Giving universal products the shove for more choices

In the not-too-distant past, popular sauce brands like Prego only sold one type of sauce.

There was a general slump in the sauce market and Prego wanted to turn that around. It was mystifying because focus groups and surveys of spaghetti eaters couldn’t really determine why the slump was happening.

That’s when Prego hired Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist. He meticulously gathered data and started analyzing them. What he found was perplexing too. The data didn’t neatly indicate a choice that a majority of people liked. It was all over the place.

Undaunted, he picked his brains till he figured out something from the unreadable morass of data. It tended to clump into three specific areas. He discovered that American consumers preferred one of three types of sauces: plain, spicy and extra-chunky.

Only chunky sauce didn’t exist in the market yet.

This was literally a revelation. One-third of the consumers liked their sauce chunky and it never came up in surveys because they didn’t know that there was such a thing.

It was a completely new sauce variation and a huge success. Howard went on to replicate what he called horizontal segmentation for other popular brands in the food industry like Pepsi. In other words, he’s the reason we have more consumer choices today.

So now, marketing was talking to specific people and helping companies develop products based on their tastes and choices.

Stage 4: Giving people the choice not to be marketed to

The 80s and 90s were important because awesome things like the personal computer and search engines got built.

After the year 2000, interruption and outbound marketing was slowly replaced by permission and inbound marketing. The idea now is to provide information and value to the user so that they come to the brand instead of the brand going to them. And when they come, the brand has to ask nicely and share domain expertise to be allowed to build a better relationship with them through newsletters and blogs.

And it gets better. This relationship is not one-way anymore. Social media lets you get personal with big brands when they do a good job or if they mess up. If they choose to ignore you, it’s going to affect their online reputation as a domain authority which in turn, will affect their sales.

One small example of a company doing inbound marketing right is the Jackson Coffee Company. They are a small chain of coffee shops in Jackson city, but they have consistently beaten other coffee giants like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts over the years 2007- 2013 to win ‘The Best Coffee House’ and ‘The Best Drive-Thru Coffee’ awards. And they say that they’ve never asked anyone to vote for them.

The reason becomes apparent when I go to their website.

They promise to send you a coupon for a free drink and a brochure revealing ‘trade secrets’ about how to brew the perfect cup of coffee if you sign up for their newsletter. (The secret: They say that no roasted beans older than 14 days are used in their coffee while coffee beans in the supermarket are stored for months. Yep, we’re drinking stale coffee.)

Naturally, I’m tempted to sign up and I’m not disappointed. Their email and website copy is sincere, interesting and informative. They don’t bother you with sales pitches every other day and they show proof of quality and taste. If I can feel the power of persuasive copy half a world away, the residents of Jacksonville are going to be no different.

When it comes to promotion, Jackson Coffee House didn’t pay popular sites like Hubspot to talk about them. They delivered great, discoverable content and watched customers and influencers walk in on their own. And that’s what inbound marketing is all about.

What It All Boils Down To

So all through the last century, the focus of marketing has been shifting from products to an individual person (popularly referred to as ‘the segment of one’). Marketing isn’t perfect yet, but the quest is on to refine the way brands reach people so that it’s less intrusive and more intent on letting them discover the perfect item at the right place and the right time. And we’re getting better at it every day.

Let me get this straight, marketing will go nowhere without product developers and service providers who address the right problems. But bringing that baby into the world needs thought, work and fresh ideas.

This is why digital marketing is so exciting! There are endless opportunities to bring these cool ideas, products and services to the world’s notice and it takes relatively less time and money to figure out what works best. You have access to so many great authorities on SEO, copywriting, social media engagement and building networks and relationships online that it’s crazy not to learn from them.

I work in marketing because I love spreading the ideas that matter the most to you and to me. And it’s a great job.

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