Why Marketing is 99% Waste

by Dave Anderson
November 15, 2013

 

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By any objective standard, the world of marketing has a skewed definition of success.  Just consider that we marketing professionals, day in and day out, celebrate the success of our campaigns knowing more than 99% of what we do yields zero results, i.e., 99% pure waste.  Even the most sophisticated, well-thought-out, and well-executed campaigns (a marketing “success”) often can’t get the target audience to click through or convert more than 99% of the time.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-marketing.   I'm a marketer through and through.  But I'm dissatisfied with the tools at my disposal and frustrated with the limits inherent to the way marketing currently works (or doesn’t work).

That's not to say the existing marketing tools don't deliver results.  Of course they do.  Marketing does have impact but to call it inefficient would be more than kind.  What’s even worse, marketing is at odds with consumer interests.

And there's the rub.  Because it is highly inefficient, we as marketers ratchet up the volume to deliver the conversions we need.  However, with everyone doing the same thing in every marketing channel, consumers are getting hammered and overloaded.  As a consequence, consumers tune out even the campaigns that could be relevant and of value to them.   The marketer and consumer become at cross purposes.  But they don't have to be.

The cause and the answer to the current marketing conundrum is simple: everything comes down to data.  The marketer does not possess the necessary data to construct intelligent marketing campaigns.  With the right data, the marketer could send the right message to the right consumer instead of simply adding to the overwhelming din.

There are marketing solutions that can improve results by leveraging interesting data such as social “likes”, web retargeting and geo-location, to name a few.  None of them, however, individually or collectively provide all the insights that a marketer needs.

Holy Grail of Marketing Data

Marketers need to know five (5) things to construct intelligent marketing campaigns:

  1. When is a consumer actively shopping for something?
  2. What item category is the consumer shopping for?
  3. What products/brands are in the consumer's consideration set?
  4. How much has the shopper previously bought in this category?
  5. Who has the shopper previously bought from in this category?

Few would dispute that, with the answers to these five questions — call it the “Holy Grail” of marketing data — even a rank novice could construct a personalized, high ROI campaign that would vastly improve upon the current 99%+ waste.

But most would just as quickly point out that the data doesn't exist.  Up until recently, I would have said, “Very true.”  A new marketing solution called Shortlist Marketing, however, with the promise of delivering the “Holy Grail” of data is emerging.  Within a couple of years, Shortlist Marketing will be here to stay and each of the major Internet players (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Pinterest, etc.) will need to have their own solution to stay relevant.

What is Shortlist Marketing?  I’ll start telling more in subsequent posts.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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