Procrastination is Marketing
2009
Procrastination is good for marketing. It may not seem so at first glance, but if you delve deeper, you’ll see it’s so. Marketing people are usually manic, running around getting things done and meeting deadlines, so they are not generally considered procrastinators. But, here’s the truth: Great marketers do procrastinate.
If you’re a fan of CBS Sunday Morning you may have seen the Fast Draw team. They do illustrations of difficult concepts to help enlighten us visual learners about whatever they feel is important. On Sunday, April 12, they illustrated the concept of procrastination. Here’s what I learned: the word is derived from Latin where pro means “forward” and crastinus means “belonging to tomorrow.”
Marketing is about looking towards tomorrow. If you wait to think about marketing until a product is done, it’s too late. Great marketing occurs early in the process long before the next product, service or great idea is a reality. Marketing believes that tomorrow will come as will the great next thing, and to be ready for it — we must dream more about and prepare for tomorrow, or procrastinate.
If you ask most marketing people why they never get to the important stuff, it’s because they’re busy meeting a tight deadline today. They are getting things done rather than determining what needs to be done to better position a company. Now, this post may seem directly opposed to my previous post “Active Tense,” but it’s not. In that post, I noted that Marketing is about getting something done. The real key, however, is to think and plan and do the best thing.
Notice I didn’t say the “right thing.” If you wait too long to determine the right thing, you may not do anything at all. That’s not procrastination, which implies you’ll just do it later. That’s downright quitting and doing nothing. Unfortunately, that’s the state of most small business marketing. Instead, consider procrastinating and having a marketing team, plan and program in place and working within the next three months. You’ll be happy you did and you’ll be amazed at what the future may look like.
*reprinted with permission from original post on InsideMarketing.org, 4/27/09, Rhona Bronson, NAPL
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