Tough Markets

The initial marketing a business does when it starts isn’t marketing and sales. It’s entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is whatever you do at the beginning of a business to see if you have something viable on which to build a business. It is a subject on its own and has its own course material covering things like bootstrapping, speed, spending more time out of the office than in the office, begging for money, begging for payments, listening to customers, and growing at all costs. Marketing is when you know something will sell, and you then make an outsized, on-face-value-irrationally large-sized investment in telling the world about it so you can sell more of it. It’s a case of spending money today to make more money tomorrow. Of course, marketing has a heart called the brand - the thing that sets you apart and legs, namely your sales activities. But I digress - none of this should ever be confused with entrepreneurship. Most SMEs are not businesses; they’re experiments trying to beco...

You don’t do marketing because you want to.  You do it because you want to grow.  Marketing is a grudge. The goal is to grow. Businesses often postpone a serious investment in marketing until they can no longer grow or find that they have exhausted all their options. It becomes a case of “What do we do now”? And the answer, unfortunately, is “marketing.”  But here’s the good news… Marketing, more than any other business function, should have a significant impact.  Finance doesn’t make an impact—they just ensure you follow the rules. HR (or whatever it’s called these days) makes no impact. They simply keep the dam wall from bursting.  Sales don’t make an impact (I said that); they harvest what’s available—picking the low-hanging fruit.  Manufacturing just makes stuff. Fill orders. IT maintains your firewall and prevents you from experimenting with cloud solutions. There’s only one function that makes an impact or that can make a real one —marketing. Mar...