Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business

Introduction

When you break down all the fluff, there are two ways to promote and market your business: dumber, slower, and expensive—or smarter, faster, and cheaper.

Dumber, slower, expensive is essentially the way it has always been taught: You market the product. Your job as an entrepreneur, business owner, or marketer is to get as many people as possible to buy by shoving whatever you've got down their throats.

Perhaps your product is the fastest, the coolest, the cheapest, the most expensive—or the most mediocre (which I'm sure yours isn't). Or maybe your services are the best in the world. You realize, of course, that a product isn't just limited to a physical entity—like a plastic moose head or something of the sort. It is whatever someone else is buying. It can be services, software, virtual material, yourself (as in the service/expertise you might provide in a given field), donations . . . whatever.

The thing is—product pushing is freakin' expensive. It can be pretty pricey to buy traditional ads, hire spokespeople, work with PR and marketing firms still stuck in 1982, and so forth; so this expense meant mass appeal was the way to go. Cast a wide net and see who fell into it. Potential customers were everywhere. And if they did not need the product, the strategy was to create a need and sell, sell, sell. Those who had the means with a mega marketing budget were assumed to be the most impressive.

Or you could hire a spokesperson or PR rep and hope your product was interesting ...