Rockmarketing

Marketing: the art of failing

Posted on 23. Mar, 2009 by Tom.

A lot of posts about measuring return on investement pop up lately.  Especially since social media is gaining some momentum, it seems like everybody who doesn’t know what they’re dealing with wants to know what they’ll get in return. 

But the problem isn’t that you can’t measure social media, in fact no marketing effort can be properly measured.  You can single out different efforts and measure the effects.  Sure, with some room for error it’s possible that you know how much people saw you ad on television.  Different studies gave percentages how much of those viewers are actively watching your ad and other studies have calculated how much, from those who’ve actively watched the ad, took some form of action.  A lot of “IF’s” for something we’re trying to measure.  If it was mathclass, we’d fail miserably.

Another “IF”.  How do you calculate the combined effect of different efforts?  A commercial, combined with radio ads, a website and some billboards?  Even if you ask people directly what made them come to your shop, you’re still not sure it was that single effort or the combined effect of everything together.

The truth is that marketing is taking on shot in the dark after another.  It’s a lot of times guessing what will work based upon previous experiences and information about your target demographic.  I don’t like an over-analytical point-of-view that doesn’t make sense.  However, I don’t mean you don’t have to analyse the results!  Because at the end, the combined efforts should relate in some way to a result.  Based upon which you can ‘guess’ what worked and what went wrong.

A great marketer should be someone who basically has a great gutt feeling and, more importantly, has the ability to change his course when he sees that something doesn’t work.  He has to be flexible and be able to quickly adapt when he fails.  Marketing is something where every effort is a failure unless something or someone makes it right.  It’s failing over and over again and trying to fix everything as fast as possible. 

How was this for a career-promoting post!?

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