We live in an Internet age, which means we live in an age mostly built by engineers- ergo, we live in a very engineer-centric world.
And what engineers love to tell us is that marketing shouldn’t matter. Only the product should matter. If you need marketing, that’s only because you haven’t designed the product well enough.
This is what we call “Window dressing marketing”. Marketing as an appendage. Marketing as an afterthought.
Marketing that doesn’t matter, in other words.
And that’s what most marketing is. And most of it is quite rightly ignored.
I don’t know about you, but we can’t afford to have marketing that’s ignored. Our marketing has to matter. Our marketing has to get people to care, or else we’re out of business.
Marketing, like engineering, either works or it doesn’t; the “big theory” behind it doesn’t matter so much.
It’s the result, it’s the idea, that matters. What the academics and armchair quarterbacks think doesn’t matter at all, because it’s not their mortgage that’s on the line.
The trick here is always the same. Seeing where the product fits in the universe. Why does it matter? Why should people care? What is going to stop people enough to convince them to change their behavior?
Window dressing, my foot. It’s a vast, bottomless rabbit hole of different meanings, circling around ever more complex meanings…
So when you find articles like this, telling you how to integrate your marketing with innovation, it’s a good thing to pay attention to what they say.
But before you do all that, you have to get your head around the idea that your marketing has to actually matter to real people, or else everything else is a waste of time.
And that’s far harder than it sounds… but the rewards are vast if you succeed.
