Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition

The Problem with Marketing

I've been told marketing success means spending lots of money.

Here's how the American Marketing Association defines it: “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”¹ Yeah, it's a mouthful.

Focus on two words here: “exchanging offerings.” Most of us have been taught that marketing is about making an offer that attracts people. We've been trained to focus on crafting the right arrangement of words and delivering them in the right place, at the right time, using the right medium.

We're treating people like fish. If we just create a better lure than our competitors, silently climb into a boat, and simply cast that bait right on top of our customers, they'll bite. Or so the theory goes.

And the word “exchange” implies a two-way process between the company and the customer. Your business makes an offer and the prospective customer is compelled to comply.

Frankly, if there weren't some level of truth to this, marketers would be out of business. I'll be the first to admit that I've successfully employed some of these very tactics.

But here's where marketing lets us down: It can't predict when people are ready to buy the type of widget you have to sell.

For example, I'm going to eventually need a new car. But right now I'm very happy with my existing car. There's no marketer out there who can predict with ...