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Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Background of the Marketing Consul
This whole idea started when I had a very, very brief opportunity to serve as a marketing volunteer to a language bureau. They were probably one of the best in town, had a friendly and committed staff, but really needed to increase their revenues. How could they do that? That was the marketing plan they didn’t have. Marketing is far more than what many people think. I met lots, but not all, kinds of freaking scary concepts about it. Engineers who thought marketing was basically painting a logo; owner-managers who think doing PR and placing their ads in a magazine is marketing; marketing managers who believed branding is marketing. The thing is, if you go to Google and type marketing you will find some 500,000,000 items. This is about the double of when you type “religion” or 20 times the word “mankind”. Do you know why?
Because people like marketing. They’re intrinsically involved with. Marketing is about people, but not every person can do marketing properly. It’s about reaching and captivating people to be on your side. You have thousands of terms, a typical jargon that most of the marketers insist to keep secret. That’s another conception about marketing, a discipline segregated to a few only. Not true! A real salesman knows how to market things. Maybe on an empirical and less strategic way, but they do.
Marketing is quite complex. I’ve been formally studying and practicing it for about 8 years and I’ll never be a master on the subject. There are no masters on the subject. It’s an untamed horse. And a different one every time you see it. There are no magic formulas or secrets. It is work, lots of common sense, questioning, discussion and imagination. Once I went to a workshop where the former head of marketing at HP was lecturing. She was great, traveled around the world, and headed very competent teams in 3 different countries. Great, she’s smart, no doubt about it.
When she started to present a customer retention program implemented by EA Sports, I realized her topic wasn’t going to be that useful for me. Reason why? Basically it had nothing to do with the company I worked for. EA Sports are huge, consolidated, market leaders and deal with video-games. The only affinity both companies had was targeting the Japanese market. The rest was different. I had neither money nor such needs to implement a detailed CRM program; focus groups were unthinkable and my customer database knowledge systems were still crawling. EA was transferring their strategy to the online environment while I am still struggling to convince the senior management to start something online etc.
Again, drop your question/comment and we’ll help as we can.
Because people like marketing. They’re intrinsically involved with. Marketing is about people, but not every person can do marketing properly. It’s about reaching and captivating people to be on your side. You have thousands of terms, a typical jargon that most of the marketers insist to keep secret. That’s another conception about marketing, a discipline segregated to a few only. Not true! A real salesman knows how to market things. Maybe on an empirical and less strategic way, but they do.
Marketing is quite complex. I’ve been formally studying and practicing it for about 8 years and I’ll never be a master on the subject. There are no masters on the subject. It’s an untamed horse. And a different one every time you see it. There are no magic formulas or secrets. It is work, lots of common sense, questioning, discussion and imagination. Once I went to a workshop where the former head of marketing at HP was lecturing. She was great, traveled around the world, and headed very competent teams in 3 different countries. Great, she’s smart, no doubt about it.
When she started to present a customer retention program implemented by EA Sports, I realized her topic wasn’t going to be that useful for me. Reason why? Basically it had nothing to do with the company I worked for. EA Sports are huge, consolidated, market leaders and deal with video-games. The only affinity both companies had was targeting the Japanese market. The rest was different. I had neither money nor such needs to implement a detailed CRM program; focus groups were unthinkable and my customer database knowledge systems were still crawling. EA was transferring their strategy to the online environment while I am still struggling to convince the senior management to start something online etc.
Again, drop your question/comment and we’ll help as we can.
Objective, for starters
The reason of this blog. There are 2 simple reasons: to spread knowledge and to help, advise and guide people who eventually need to make marketing and business development, including discussing and developing real strategies without involving fees. I’m a consultant by the way (e-mail me here if you want to know more about my background). Once I learned “the best things in life are for free”.
Here’s the deal: leave your question or doubt about marketing and/or business development, any type of question, from the general concept to the specific need. It might be even about your own business or work. I won’t answer everything correctly, even because my objective is to create a networking among the users of this blog. There will be disagreements. Nevertheless, the ultimate decision will be yours, the questioner. Nobody here can accept liability for the ideas suggested. However, as the blog administrator, I’ll make sure the discussion remains professional and high level.
You might ask yourself: why such a person would want to accumulate more work without charging for it? That’s another problem with marketing these days. Marketers will charge you a fortune for something that should be taught at elementary school. I do this for pleasure; for the opportunity to gain knowledge from different people and situations. I chose marketing on my 16th birthday and never regretted a single day since then. Business development is more recent. Also, it is my understanding that marketing is collective, not exclusive property of those who judge themselves marketers. Google offers most of their softwares for free in the web. Adobe is following. Why not sharing marketing and business development ideas?
The Marketing Consul: One day you might wonder yourself how this name came up. It’s actually a combination of meanings. “Consul” is the beginning of consultant (a public consultant in this case), but also a position that is known by the representation of someone, to protect commercial interests and help citizens. Got the whole point?
Here’s the deal: leave your question or doubt about marketing and/or business development, any type of question, from the general concept to the specific need. It might be even about your own business or work. I won’t answer everything correctly, even because my objective is to create a networking among the users of this blog. There will be disagreements. Nevertheless, the ultimate decision will be yours, the questioner. Nobody here can accept liability for the ideas suggested. However, as the blog administrator, I’ll make sure the discussion remains professional and high level.
You might ask yourself: why such a person would want to accumulate more work without charging for it? That’s another problem with marketing these days. Marketers will charge you a fortune for something that should be taught at elementary school. I do this for pleasure; for the opportunity to gain knowledge from different people and situations. I chose marketing on my 16th birthday and never regretted a single day since then. Business development is more recent. Also, it is my understanding that marketing is collective, not exclusive property of those who judge themselves marketers. Google offers most of their softwares for free in the web. Adobe is following. Why not sharing marketing and business development ideas?
The Marketing Consul: One day you might wonder yourself how this name came up. It’s actually a combination of meanings. “Consul” is the beginning of consultant (a public consultant in this case), but also a position that is known by the representation of someone, to protect commercial interests and help citizens. Got the whole point?
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