Marketing can't fix a broken business. The speaker argues that before investing in new tools or flashy campaigns, you need to clarify what your business actually does well, identify what needs to improve, and build messaging around that vision. Sales may hide problems until customers start complaining.
Chapters
What's the single biggest problem businesses have when marketing their product or service? Reach? Messaging? Budget? Before you can seriously improve your marketing, you need to ensure the business itself is up to scratch. To misquote David Ogilvy, "Marketing is what you're obliged to do when you don't have a great product." There's no Darwinian theory to suggest that all bad businesses eventually go under, Anymore than businesses that "do things right"—whatever that means—have a guaranteed path to success. There are plenty of businesses ticking over just fine. Sure, the product could be improved in a number of ways. Yes, due to the internet we may be steadily losing sales we would have won in the past. But sales are still coming in and bills are still being paid. However, complacency is the refuge of the mediocre. You know, it's just a matter of time before new customers voice their misgivings with the idiosyncrasies that existing customers have put up up with for years. Once the tide has turned, it's often too late. So the first thing you've got to do is make the business itself better. But what does better look like? Well, that depends on you. Getting clear about what your own better looks like is often the single hardest part of marketing. As a result, it's the part that most people want to skip over. Instead of looking inward, marketers want to look outward. They want to have a new elevator pitch. They want to design a new whiz-bang website. Or spend a fortune on martech, Web3, AI, spatial computing, or whatever other shiny new thing is preoccupying people's attention this week. At its most fundamental, marketing is about affecting change— change in values, attitudes, perceptions, or, or habits. The challenge is educating, informing, or entertaining your audience with a marketing story that's perceived as the change you want to happen. To create messaging that resonates, that tells people something they've been waiting to hear and are open to believe. To take them to a place where change may happen, that solves a problem and delivers on its promise.
