MARKETING MANAGEMENT

SUMMARY OF THE BOOK

TITLE“YOUR MARKETING SUCKS”

SUBMITTED TO

MR. SHOAIB SHAMSI

SUBMITTED BY

MUHAMMAD OWAIS (MS29-2269)

SUMMARY OF THE BOOK

If every dollar that you spend on marketing isn't generating more than that amount, then your

marketing sucks. You might as well throw away thousand-dollar bills in spending on marketing.

So says author Mark Stevens, creator of the Extreme Marketing process.

Extreme Marketing is based on the premise that you know why and what you are spending for in

marketing. In other words, your spending is in context with specific goals. There should be a

plan that makes every marketing tactic reinforce the other. What gets back must be more than

what you spend

Mark Stevens pointed out all those problems that are the root of your lazy marketing and gave

the solution to eliminate them.

Why your marketing sucks:

Here are some of the examples that will insure you that your marketing sucks

Many companies don't understand what marketing is. One company spent more than a

million dollars for 10,000 copies of a beautiful brochure, only to keep them warehoused

in the end. The reason? The brochures were too expensive to give away to just about

anyone.

Companies operate by generalities. An expert says that a 1% hit rate for direct mail

marketing is good enough. And companies limit themselves by this adage, if it is true at

all.

Many companies undertake only one form of marketing, such as print advertising, instead

of a swarming offense that targets everyone wherever that person turns, from print ads to

outdoor advertising to infomercials.

Many expensive programs are devoid of innovative thinking. They're hung up on doing

what their competitors do, but better. In the end, no one remembers. The key lies in

innovation, in being remembered.

Many companies don't make use of available research. There are databases that can be

accessed to enhance the marketing effort.

Many marketing professionals remain unaccountable for results or the lack of them.

Consider this case of a major IT company. The person responsible for producing a

magazine-cum-catalog that didn't even generate enough revenue to cover its cost because

the idea was poorly executed was rewarded with a promotion. The “mag-a-log” itself was

great. But because the company had no way of selling to customers directly, except only

through an “authorized representative”, it cost them more than what it had brought in. A

person who should have been fired was instead promoted.

“Winning ideas win only if they are executed brilliantly”

Most of the companies waste both time and money on making or trying to make a non sales

person a sales person but reality check is; you cannot stop a salesperson from selling and you

cannot make a non sales person to sell anything here’s an idea that I’ll explain the above “if you

provide an accountant with a product they can recommend customers will trust their advise and

buy and everybody is going to make a lot of money. It simply sounds like mother of all

marketing insight

Reality Check

Accountant can’t sell anything to anyone for most of them a telephone is an electric fence they

would never think of picking it up to sell a client or even to ask for a business over perfectly

delightful lunch.

So a seemingly terrific idea turns out to be another form of a marketing that sucks

Hire a salesperson not those who have “Salesperson” in their CVs but those who can actually

sale. Sales people aren’t afraid to make a cold call they are hire for sale and they have passion for

what they do they are not afraid of rejection.

In Your Marketing Sucks, Mark Stevens discusses how to look at the money you spend in

marketing as a direct investment with a direct Return on Investment (ROI). Referred to as

extreme marketing, Stevens demands (and you should too) that every $1 you spend on marketing

should bring back at least $1 in revenue.

What is “extreme marketing?”

Stevens says extreme marketing is “doing everything possible to guarantee that every marketing

dollar you spend:

Is set in a strategic context - meaning you know why you are spending it

Is based on a plan constructed to make certain that every marketing tactic reinforces

every other one

Brings back more than $1 in revenue”

The last point is the most important: for EVERY marketing dollar you spend, you need to

know how much revenue it brings you.

Did you know? Brand marketers will generally tell you that you have to invest in the brand, and

not think of things this way. That’s a cop-out for not thinking through how to quantify the impact

of a brand campaign. Direct response marketers will generally tell you to only invest in

marketing tactics where you can immediately track this metric. While ideal, that might not be

true for everyone either.

Bottom-line: whatever situation or “marketing philosophy” you have, you HAVE to figure this

out. It’s the way to bring accountability to your marketing, and really grow your business

through it’s marketing efforts.

Extreme Marketing Plan:

In the section “How to Think About Extreme Marketing” Stevens outlines an excellent 7-step

process…

1. Marketing is an integrated process (i.e. all of your marketing tactics - direct mail,

website, etc. - work together to drive your business

2. Identify innovative initiatives that can command the attention in the marketplace

3. Integrate all of the elements of your marketing program

4. Stop all marketing tactics that do not produce a positive return on the money invested

5. Pick the low-hanging fruit (i.e. you don’t always have to invest more money to grow your

business)

6. Don’t be linear (i.e. overlap marketing tactics for exponential returns)

7. Be persistent, relentless, inventive, counter-intuitive, challenging, combative,

strategic, and tactical

No. 7 is Stevens’s favorite step. Why? Because those are management tips, personal productivity

tips, and marketing tips all in one - basically, they are how you should act every day as a leader!

What You Can Learn from Infomercial

Stevens has a great section on “Earning your infomercial MBA.” Now, before you cringe, think

about it - some of the products we buy every day started as infomercials. And, who hasn’t stayed

up late at least once in their life watching an infomercial on TV. They capture attention, they

push the desire to buy, and they work for a lot of products.

The tips Stevens suggests in this section on infomercials can be applied to every marketing

project:

1. Give your product a cool and compelling name

2. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words

3. Provide the appearance of exceptional value

4. Expose the viewer to testimonials

Marketing Leadership

In one of my favorite sections of the book, Stevens outlines lazy marketing leadership and

effective marketing leadership, as follows:

4 Mistakes of Marketing Leaders

1. Creating a budget first, and goals second

2. Being a one-day wonder

3. Delegate

4. The gullibility factor

4 Attributes of Effective Marketing Leadership

1. The ability to paint a picture of what the marketing will accomplish

2. The determination to monitor the logistics and measure the results

3. The staying power to remain committed throughout the course of the campaign

4. The willingness to create a tight alignment between the president’s office and the

marketing campaign

As you look the integration of your marketing elements graphically, you will come to see more

clearly how you must knit them together to generate the king of synergies that make 1+1=3

Sometimes truth s stranger than fiction. If you were told that a company would go through the

Herculean public-relations effort of getting its product featured on a global cable network linked

to a dot com detonation, only to have the consumer be unable to purchase the product promoted

you would think that would be impossible. But lazy marketing strikes every day and hurts

companies.

So we return to our caveat: don’t go back to the office…..yet. Not until you have determined to

engage in marketing only for the sake of growing your business-not for the sake of marketing-

and that you will do everything you can to make certain that the initiatives you launch are

structured and to achieve maximum impact in the marketplace.

You are not in the process of marketing to protect your butt, or satisfy your ego, or demonstrate

that you’re a well rounded businessperson. At the end of the day your marketing must generate

more money than it costs. If your marketing doses that you will increase revenues and profits and

therefore, the ultimate valuation of your business.

All too often, business people go to seminars in hotels, training centers, and universities and

spend all kinds of money learning all kind of things and getting hyped up about the kinds of

change they need to make to help their businesses become more successful.

All that learning and all that hype and all that motivation and all that energy and zeal often float

out the window as soon as they go back to work and get lost in the usual treadmill of answering

phone calls and email going to meeting having conversation putting out fires and searching for

opportunities.

Extreme marketing is just that: extreme. It required a determination to take things to max in

every way and to make certain that therefore there are no exceptions.

That is a key difference between companies that grow in size and profitability and market share

and power and clout, and those that don’t. And there is no reason your company cannot be one of

the firm that soar.

Whether you are successful at this point or not whether you have grown to this point or want to

grow bigger, doesn’t make difference. The fact is that every company must either consistently

move ahead or inevitably, fall behind. There is not staying in place.

Companies that fail to strive for growth inevitably all behind shrink and ultimately die. This is

your choice and no internal tinkering will help you grow the business significantly. Yes, it may

increase profitability by reducing overhead and improve customer service and make your

company a nicer place to work and all that is fin. But remember Tom Watson’s enormously

important observation: “Nothing happens until someone sells something.”

If you wait to back to the office until that thought settles in your mind, until you have decided

that you will take drastic action to make certain that the concept permeates your culture and

everything you do in your business then you will make the traction from a Lazy Marketer to

being an Extreme Marketer, and you will reap the benefits that come from that dramatic change.

“The only way to gauge marketing is to ask if it generates a significant return on investment and

in turn helps to grow your business.”

CONCLUSION

Marketing, it seems, has merely become a buzzword for throwing more and more money at

fancy ads and flashy websites.

If you're like most businesses, you've probably watched that line item in your budget growing

exponentially every year. We're told that good marketing is the key to success, and more often

than not, it is insinuated that "good" marketing means "expensive" marketing. In fact, Stevens

recommends a complete moratorium on marketing so that businesses will take the time to review

their strategies and find out if all that money they're investing is actually bringing money back to

the company. Doing any marketing at all, and that means marketing that doesn´t equate to a

return on your investment, such as a brochure that costs thousand dollars to produce and

generated no revenue, was that better than doing nothing? No. Doing nothing would have been

better because you would have had ten thousand dollars in your pocket that you could have

invested in some other part of your business.

Now, marketing is critical to the growth of your business. It´s not just some addendum thing that

you should consider whether or not you want to do it. You can´t grow a business without it. You

need some sort of marketing to grow a business, and the best way to employ marketing is to

employ it in an integrated sense. But nobody said you had to spend a lot of money. And that´s a

huge and important thing to consider-- that marketing doesn´t always equate to spending huge

sums of money.

No, in fact I think there can be an inverse relationship. Often, the more money you spend, the

less productive it is. You can´t throw dollars at an issue; you have to throw ideas and execution

at an issue. One of the most powerful forces that many businesses aren´t tapping into is the Web,

the Internet. Not a website-- most websites don´t do anything. They should be closed down. Not

necessarily forever, but for right now Stevens call them cold sites; they don´t help the business,

and they do no good for anyone.

People built them at – often at considerable expense, they´ll refresh them next year for more

expense, and they don´t really know why they´re doing it. Someone just told them they “had to

have a website". When we ask these people if they get business from it, the answer is always no.

They´re like millions of cold planets floating around in cyberspace that do nothing except absorb

dollars.

You should only have a web site if it will do something, and that something is to grab a visitor,

get them to give you their information so you can go back and sell them something, or sell them

something right on the site.

Someone once said to Stevens that `most businesses are organized the way they´re organized

because that´s how they´re organized.´

And most people do their marketing the way they do their marketing because that´s how they do

their marketing. In some cases, you´ll find the third generation of owners doing the same thing as

their grandfathers did in terms of implementing a marketing structure.

Often, a company´s founder will be the type who´s a natural born marketer. He or she is a person

who knew how to stand out in front of the company and get business.

They were a great hunter and they knew how to go out and close a deal. If they didn´t, they

wouldn´t be in business. That skill is not necessarily transferable to the next generations. It doesn

´t necessarily have to be, but you have to have someone out in front that can do that.

It doesn´t even necessarily have to be a person; it can be a strategy or a process. It can be a web

strategy or a direct mail strategy; it could be an email strategy or advertising, or, best of all, a

combination of those.

That´s why most family businesses die after the second or third generation, because the original

customers die and because the natural marketing ability of the founder hasn´t transferred to the

next generation.

Most of the reader’s aren´t marketers. What they´re doing is creating a brochure or building a

website. That´s not marketing. Doing public relations that turns out press clippings? That´s not

marketing. They´re spending money on marketing, but they´re not marketing. They´re just doing

stuff that costs money, and that´s not marketing. Marketing is building a business, and marketing

is not about spending money. You often do have to spend some money at some point and you

build on it.