For some, it’s always seemed like “how things should be”. But, it’s certainly not a common approach. Indeed, for most people, marketing is just a department of people who generate “marketing materials”, which are usually seen as hit-or-miss (mostly miss) pieces for sales people to use. Or, marketing can be the essentially fluffly and useful “mass” communication tools that no one reads. Either way, marketing is usually considered a necessary evil at best and expendable at worst. So, what do we do about this?
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As we discussed last time, a new vendor is judged on quality and a current vendor is judged on service. Hence, the new vendor must stack his/her quality against the current vendor’s quality. So, the new vendor must create a value proposition that not only shows the quality of the service. It must also undermine the service of the incumbent.
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It’s a common bragging point for service businesses that their service is better than their competitors. And it’s just as common for marketers to complain about such ‘value’ propositions. They say that service is not a differentiator and that no one buys on service. Instead, there must be some differentiation or value in the product or result. In this sense, marketers says that the quality must be paramount.
So, which really is better?
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It seems clear that Google rankings depend on inbound links to your site. But it also seems clear that the rankings depend on actual clicks. And one of the biggest click sources is Google itself. It’s certainly true that being higher in the search rankings means more clicks. So, it starts to look like getting in the top 10 for your keywords depends on being in the top 10.
If your agency is towards the low end of the client vendor value chain, and by that I mean execution-focused, your services are always in danger of being unecessary. How can you avoid that?
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An agency, in the oldest commercial form of the word, is a company that takes action on behalf of another company. In the marketing world, it’s a company that provides marketing, branding, and/or design products. It’s to be distinguished from consulting companies that provide services.
An agency, then, is supposed to be an extension of a company. It starts with a company’s goals and then acts as an extension of that company to provide products that support those goals.
The agency in this form has been around some 50 years or so. And the current question is “Does this approach make sense anymore?”
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Every design-oriented work seems to follow the same process: create the work, present, revise. My question today is whether this is the best approach.
Using this process, by the time the work is presented, it’s usually pretty finished. Thus, the revise step seems difficult and seems to wrench the project off-track.
What’s more, even if you cycle through this process several times, in the hopes of getting better results, you are just repeating the same problems.
Is there a better approach?
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This post will discuss something that is at the heart of everything we do as human beings. It also shows why we have marketing and branding companies at all. Finally, it shows why I love this business so much.
We are essentializing beings. That is, our way of knowing the world tends heavily towards looking for the essential, the typical, and the regular. We tend to see the general, the core, the one single “thing” that summarizes, encapsulates, or explains what we’re looking at.
And this is the core thought behind the importance of branding.
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Last time, we talked about whether you should outsouce marketing. We concluded that it’s better to have a truly outside perspective on your company. But what about sales?
I think of marketing as fundamentally “understanding your company” and then, of course, communicating about it. I think of sales as fundamentally “being your company”. Just as it’s not possible to know yourself fully, it’s not possible for someone else to be you fully. And this is why outsourced sales efforts always feel, well, outsourced.
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