How to Market to People Not Like You: "Know It or Blow It" Rules for Reaching Diverse Customers

Chapter 1. Get Out of Your Comfort Zone to Grow Sales

"SPRAY AND PRAY" VERSUS BROAD THINKING AND NARROWCASTING

Marketers are lazy. I should know—I'm a marketer. I don't mean to imply we don't work hard. We do. We work our butts off. And we tend to be unappreciated. There's even a joke about it in my field: "When business is great, the credit goes to the Sales Department. When business is bad, blame Marketing."

Marketing is hard. It's not like other disciplines in business that are easily measured or quantified. For example, if you're in the Product Development Department of a technology company and you develop a new computer system, you can test and test and retest that system to see where the bugs and glitches are before you ever release it for launch. In marketing, we can take certain steps to "test" our thinking, our approach, and our message, but it's still very hard to anticipate human behavior, desires, and what will ultimately inspire someone to buy something.

Marketers are also highly accountable for the results of their work. If you're a marketing executive at a company and your efforts don't yield the anticipated sales results, your butt's on the line. If you work for an ad agency and your clients don't get the results they want or expect, your clients will probably fire you. If you're a small business owner, your budget pressure is enormous and you need to make every dollar count.

When I say "marketers are lazy," what I mean by that is that we are often guilty of being lazy ...