The New Southern Standard

I get excited about business.

It really doesn’t matter what it is, when someone starts talking about business, they get my full attention. I’ve learned over the years that this isn’t the best behavior at cocktail parties, so I include other topics when I’m in public. However, discussing business really gets my blood flowing. As a consequence, I find myself in a lot of business conversations.

There is a shocking theme that underlies most of the conversations - the lack of marketing. Most people launch off into a spiel about their product problem or the future potential of their business. And the ones with business ideas (or schemes) are so excited to get started that they just ‘go,’ without any real idea of where they are heading. In all of these situations, these are smart people who know and appreciate the role of marketing, but they ignore the marketing step entirely.

Here are 3 examples:

- A very close friend and I are talking about a new business that he is starting. The product will be sold over the web and payments will be accepted online. Because of contractual reasons, he wasn’t able to
tell me the product. But he did say that he had researched domain names on GoDaddy, he could build a website, and that he knew a little about PayPay, and “that’s 90% of the work.”

There was no talk about fulfillment, upselling, demand, messaging, demographics, pipelines, conversion, seo, sem, backend, positioning, usp, and so on. It was the perfect example of build it and they will come. Also, since this is their first online venture, there was a lack of meta-knowledge. They didn’t know what they didn’t know.

He’s a pretty smart guy, so he’ll quickly figure it out he needs some marketing help. But, there was no talk of it upfront.

- The second scenario involves a local owner who has multiple ventures, but only one of them is going well. As I asked about marketing, he didn’t have a website, the products were high-end products, but his marketing was decidedly low-end - small classified ads and flyers. Clearly there was a mismatch between the message and the demographic. He is trying a mass approach of interrupting people. Interrupt enough people and someone will buy. There was no discussion of the buying process or demographics. They didn’t know the customer at all.

- And then there is the owner of a retirement care facility. She called in desperation because she was finishing her building and she had no tenets. She had been convinced by the local TV station to buy some ads, but ‘the only people calling from the ads were people looking for jobs.’ Shocking. In her case, there was no lead capture, psycho-graphics, competitive analysis, pipeline, or USP. She, like the others, just hoped to interrupt enough people with her ads that she had someone show up. ( Also, she thought she was marketing to the retirees, when in fact she should have been marketing to their families. )

These folks all had one thing in common - they were product-focused, not market-focused. No one did the upfront work to determine how to be successful. They didn’t know the market, how to sell the product, or even if there was demand for what they are selling. They just put the product out there and hoped for the best. The good news is that they will soon (if they haven’t already) recognize the importance of marketing.

On a positive note, a local real estate company approached me with the right mindset. They saw the potential for business growth and identified the opportunity. They approached me with several questions -

- “Is there a market here?”

- “How do we make the most amount of money on this endeavor?”

- “How do we reach the right customers?”

Brilliant. There is at least one firm one step closer to being successful.