The Marketing Plaza

Is your company long-term greedy, or short-sighted for sales?
A clue may lie in your  definition of  marketing.

Great marketing, according to best-selling author Joe Vitale, is inspired. Perhaps that’s why most marketing isn’t all that great.  For most companies, marketing tends to be out of desperation rather than inspiration.

It’s part of the problem American businesses face, in general, with short-term versus long-term thinking.  In the short-term, the business needs a sale – badly.  Hence, a CEO calls in a marketing team to help facilitate a sale  NOW!  It’s what causes confusion between marketing and sales promotion. I call it Desperation Marketing.

Better marketing is long-term based — building reputation, relationships and community over time.  Inspired marketing draws people to a product, service or business because they want to be affiliated with what that company has to offer.

I recently met with a business planning professor from a local college to discuss business planning. He used to work for Goldman Sachs on Wall Street. He told the story of one of his mentors — a great Goldman Sachs leader of his time– who decided to retire a few years ago when the company became, in his opinion, too short-sighted. By short- sighted, the retiring executive meant ‘in search of this year’s sales.”  Goldman Sachs had been known, he said, for being “long-term greedy,” a positive attribute that differentiated the company for greatness and fostered  building long-term wealth over short-term gain.

I have no way to test if the story is true, but it rings true because this week Goldman Sachs is all over the news in terms of its outrageous bonuses for 2009. The company claims that its executives deserve the bonuses due to outstanding performances during tough economic times.  Even if  true, it’s  insensitive to the marketplace – defined as the rest of us.  It also positions Goldman Sachs as self-centered and  greedy – short-term greedy.

I’m not here to bash Goldman Sachs.  It’s just a story that was told to me this week. But, I am here to say:

“Think about your marketing and positioning.”

Remind yourself that, unless you’re a venture capitalist or a real estate house flipper, you’re likely in business for the long haul.  Use your marketing dollars and efforts accordingly.

Where do PR and advertising fall in the Marketing Toolkit?  As with everything else these days, they are both evolving, and through Darwinian logic are becoming more assimilated in the Internet Age. Years ago, in the mass market era, marketing was advertising.  Then, PR became more popular and split as its own area of specialization replete with PR agencies separate from ad agencies.  If there was any early distinction it may have been that PR was for celebrities and advertising for products, but the Tylenol scare of 1986 clearly changed all that. Brand managers learned that PR had a big place to play in their marketing plans and not always just for crisis management.

PR continued to grow in stature as brand managers also learned that an item mentioned in a news article had more credibility than a straight ad.  Advertising agencies suddenly needed PR partners on the team. Then, team dynamics changed. Twelve years later, in 2002, advertising guru Al Reis and his daughter Laura Reis went so far as to espouse the death of advertising in their book The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR.

Today, I'd venture to say PR is advertising — almost direct mail advertising.   PR now targets specific customers rather than groups of customers. This is best discussed in David Meerman Scott's book The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

Unfortunately, most printing companies never latched on to the potential of PR even in the days when it was a relatively simple science.  They never hired staff or affiliated with freelancers with strong writing skills and never felt they had enough news to share with the world.  In today's world, where everything is about the latest news (newspaper woes aside), well done press releases now position forward-thinking businesses as experts in their field with news about topics rather than events or staff promotions. It's a way to get a message out to a public increasingly through Twitter, LinkedIn, e-mail messages directly to prospects and current customers, and a tiny little bit of pitching to the media (increasingly trade over mainstream). 

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say PR has grown up.  More accurately, it's probably experiencing its second childhood — taking the big boys to the teen playground of modern social media.