DOI: 10.48370/ofd/gmez9k
title: How to Think About Marketing in 2024

description: These days, most people are too busy (physically, psychologically, and emotionally) to notice and pay attention to all the marketing and advertising going on around them. If you want people to pay attention to your business or organization, your marketing needs to show them something they have never seen before. Few products and services are truly unique (at least in the eyes of consumers) and thus marketing must serve the purpose of this “something” that your prospective customers have never seen before. This is what marketing guru Seth Godin calls being a “purple cow.”1 I call this concept being “unexpected and relevant.” More on it soon. Businesses and organizations that have a good product or service usually have similar frustrations: They do not have a good marketing system that keeps their business or organization and its product or service “top of mind” so that consumers think of them first and most prominently when they are willing, able, and ready to make a purchase. As marketing expert Dan Kennedy wrote, “Without a sufficient and steady stream of people with whom you can exchange value for money, nothing else about your business matters.”2 Traditionally, marketing was a combination of what is known as the five P’s: product, pricing, promotion, placement, and people. But like many old-world notions, this combination is not working as well as it once did. And those who are unwilling to confront this reality will sooner or later realize: Conventional marketing is boring and typical. In other words, it does not get noticed and keep consumers’ attention. When Seth Godin was in a nice hotel, for instance, he asked a few people who were reading a newspaper to name two companies with full-page ads. Nobody could even remember two. “We find ourselves in an era where digital platforms are so overwhelmed with bullshit that the challenge for marketing executives (and even parents, for that matter) extends beyond just capturing attention — it’s about maintaining it. Well, at least for 30 seconds — the minimum amount of time a user must watch or listen on Spotify or Youtube in order for the content to be “counted" (and thereby paid royalties),” wrote Jon Judah, Chief Strategy Officer at Huge, a technology design firm.3 This lack of awareness is due to the fact that the average person does not pay attention to marketing unless it meets their exact needs. Even if you wanted a new watch, you probably do not pay much attention to watch ads. Hence, conventional marketing and advertising in mass media has been quickly losing its effectiveness. Yet there are those who still cling to conventional marketing because it makes people feel safe, but the irony is that “safe” in today’s marketplaces is the riskiest bet of all. As I wrote, effective marketing is unexpected and relevant. “Unexpected” means that people have not seen it before, and relevant means that what your marketing does and says is compelling, magnetic, hard to ignore, naturally engaging, and “draws them to you like a bright porch light on a dark night draws moths,” as Kennedy poetically put it. “A marketing message is a way of concisely and clearly saying to the right market, ‘Here’s what I’m all about and here’s why you should choose me.’” Now more than ever, we are living in an age of “permission marketing” whereby consumers have an easy, convenient choice to opt in and out of receiving marketing. You can effortlessly unsubscribe to email newsletters, unfollow businesses and organizations on social media, choose not to see certain advertisements on Google and YouTube, and install an ad-blocker on your internet browser. If your business or organization does “interruption marketing” — marketing that is overly promotional and self-serving, rather boring, or just plainly irrelevant — consumers will “turn you off” and tell their family, friends, and colleagues to do the same. To do “permission marketing” effectively and not risk consumers “turning you off,” you must do the opposite of promotional, self-serving, boring, and irrelevant. Moreover, you must make your business or organization and its product or service the go-to source for some target audience(s) that will be exponentially interested, first and foremost, in your marketing — and then, by extension, your product or service. Those who try to make consumers first and foremost interested in their product or service tend to significantly underachieve at both marketing and sales, as well as customer retention and other vital metrics. This matters because, according to Dan Kennedy, the financial reality is that in every profession, every industry and sector, every sales team, and every population, these figures hold true: One percent create tremendous incomes and wealth. Four percent do very well. 15 percent earn good livings. 60 percent struggle endlessly. 20 percent fail. Many business and organizational operators are essentially clueless about strategizing and executing effective marketing and advertising, which makes them highly vulnerable to becoming what Kennedy calls “Advertising Victims” — easy prey for people and platforms that sell paid media placements. To add insult to injury, Kennedy claims that many operators make these most common marketing mistakes: Marketing to the wrong people Saying the wrong things in marketing and advertising content Asking consumers to do the wrong things in marketing and advertising content Thinking you can advertise anywhere and everywhere Not having a marketing system Chasing customers Racing to the bottom in low or lower prices No real, strategic follow-up At a minimum, your marketing system should focus on three key areas: lead generation (the ongoing acquisition of relevant, qualified leads for your business or organization), conversion (the process of converting these leads into paying customers), and retention and referral (turning first-time customers into repeat ones and generating new relevant, qualified leads based on their referrals). Within your marketing system, there are three main components: messaging (truly unique, preferably irresistible, messages in marketing and advertising), market (high-probability target audiences, and predominantly those most likely to respond), and media or content (the most appropriate, effective combination of media used to deliver your message to your market). To find these high-profitability target audiences, businesses and organizations have been deploying the “multichannel” approach, which means they target, engage, and interact with customers through multiple channels, both online and offline. Consumers also have the option to engage with the business or organization through various touch-points, such as physical stores, websites, mobile apps, social media platforms, email, telephone, et cetera. Then came “omni-channel” marketing, which offers customers a seamless and integrated experience across all channels and touch-points. The experience remains consistent whether a customer interacts with a business or organization online, in a mobile app, over the phone, or in person. The customer knows the business or organization and vice versa, and neither party needs to “reauthenticate” themselves over and over again. Now, a new trend is emerging: “opti-channel” marketing, defined as the most optimal channel to interact with customers. Rather than focusing on seamless integration across channels like “omni-channel” marketing, “opti-channel” focuses on maximizing the performance and effectiveness of each channel. This involves analyzing customer data, behaviors and preferences specific to each channel and tailoring marketing efforts accordingly to optimize results. According to Annette Franz, a 30-year customer experience expert, “Opti-channel strategies aim to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time through each channel, maximizing engagement and conversions.”4 Overall, “multichannel” marketing is generally the most straightforward to implement, as it involves establishing multiple channels for customer interaction without necessarily requiring tight integration between them. “Omni-channel” is more complex and resource-intensive to execute than “multichannel.” It requires integrating systems, data and processes across channels to deliver a seamless experience. And an “opti-channel” approach requires a deep understanding of individual channels and significant investment in data analysis and optimization tools, making it potentially more challenging to execute than a basic “multichannel” approach but less complex than achieving true omni-channel integration. Combining “opti-channel” approaches with an “omni-channel” strategy can certainly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of a business or organization’s overall marketing efforts, by consistently monitoring and optimizing the channels within the “omni-channel” approach to personalize experiences, enhance customer engagement, and maximize results. By integrating “opti-channel” strategies into an “omni-channel” framework, you can leverage the strengths of both approaches to create more effective and personalized customer experiences across all channels. And this is what marketing has become: about the experience, not just about the message, market, and media (all of which are part of the overall experience that your marketing and advertising provide). There are two aspects of marketing that involve experience: First, that marketing is one of the (integral) spokes of your business or organization’s overall customer experience. This concept is known as “metamarketing,” whereby business and organizational operators understand the entire ecosystem surrounding their business or organization and leverage every bit of it to engage customers deeply and meaningfully. Metamarketing transcends mere product promotion; it emphasizes immersive customer experiences that seamlessly blend the physical and digital worlds, of which marketing and advertising are an essential part.5 Since consistency is key for both effective marketing and branding, every part of your marketing and advertising must authentically feel like every other interaction and engagement that people have with your business or organization and its product or service. To embrace metamarketing is to develop a unified customer experience across all touch-points, physical and digital. If your marketing and advertising are not obviously congruent with other portions of your business or organization and its product or service, or vice versa, consumers will be turned off by the “mixed messages” and inconsistent experiences. The second aspect of marketing which involves experience is that your marketing ought to provide micro-experiences to consumers, as if marketing is a product or service in and of itself, the currency of which is consumers’ time and attention. This is because today’s consumers unquestionably desire experiences, and more and more businesses and organizations are responding by explicitly designing and promoting them. As the book, The Experience Economy, aptly points out: Experiences have emerged as the next step in what the authors call the “progression of economic value.”6 From now on, leading-edge businesses and organizations — whether they sell to B2B, B2C, or D2C — will find that the next competitive battleground lies in staging experiences. “An experience is not an amorphous construct; it is as real an offering as any service, good, or commodity,” wrote the authors, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore.7 From the book, The Experience Economy (graphic: Everise) In marketing, an experience occurs when a business or organization intentionally uses channels and platforms as the stage, and media or content as props, to engage consumers in a way that creates memorable micro-experiences. Commodities are fungible, products tangible, services intangible, and experiences memorable. Whereas commodities, products, and services are external to consumers, experiences are inherently personal, existing only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level. As such, businesses and organizations must design marketing micro experiences that consumers judge to be worth their time and attention. Excellent design, messaging, visuals, and delivery are every bit as crucial for marketing experiences as they are for products and services.  “Ingenuity and innovation will always precede growth in revenue,” according to Pine and Gilmore. “Yet experiences, like products and services, have their own distinct qualities and characteristics and present their own design challenges.” One way to think about experiences is across two dimensions. The first corresponds to consumer participation. At one end of the spectrum lies passive participation, in which consumers do not affect the marketing micro-experience at all. At the other end of the spectrum lies active participation, in which consumers play key roles in creating the marketing micro-experience that yields memorability. The second dimension of experience describes the connection, or environmental relationship, that unites consumers with marketing micro-experiences. At one end of the connection spectrum lies absorption; at the other end, immersion. A video can absorb consumers; meanwhile, virtual and augmented reality immerse consumers. This is known as “immersive marketing” in which consumers want to be part of their favorite businesses and organizations’ “story” by interacting and engaging in ways previously imagined only in science fiction. You can also sort marketing micro-experiences into four broad categories according to where they fall along the spectra of the two dimensions. The kinds of experiences most people think of as entertainment marketing content tend to be those in which consumers participate more passively than actively; their connection with the experience is more likely one of absorption than of immersion Educational marketing content tends to involve more active participation, but consumers are still more outside the experience than immersed in it. Escapist marketing content can teach just as well as educational content can, or amuse just as well as entertainment, but they involve greater consumer immersion. If you minimize the consumers’ active participation, however, an escapist event becomes an experience of the fourth kind — the esthetic. Here consumers are immersed in an activity or environment, but they themselves have little or no effect on it. “The Four Realms of an Experience” from the book, The Experience Economy (graphic: The Framework Bank) Generally, the richest experiences marketing micro-experiences encompass aspects of all four realms, forming a “sweet spot” around the area where the spectra meet. But still, the universe of possible experiences is vast. Eventually, the most significant question you can ask yourself is: “What specific experience marketing micro-experiences will my business or organization offer?” These experiences will come to define your business or organization. Experiences, like products and services, ought to meet a consumer need; they must work; and they have to be deliverable. Just as products and services result from an iterative process of research, design, and development, experiences derive from an iterative process of exploration, scripting, and staging — capabilities that forward-thinking, effective marketers need to master. Experience-centric marketing and advertising is challenging, to say the least. This is why many marketers look at what their competitors are doing in marketing and advertising, and aim to do something more or less similar. But uniformity comes at a significant cost, both a creative and financial one. And this flood of generic marketing and advertising has a two-pronged impact for businesses and organizations, simultaneously inflating the cost per acquisition (now over 200 percent from 10 years ago) while diminishing the overall effectiveness of marketing and advertising. In a saturated market, dull campaigns and marketing micro-experiences require significantly larger budgets to match the performance of more engaging, creative work. Marketing consultant Peter Field’s recent research into the “Cost of Dull” estimates that it costs an average of $12 million more annually for marketing and advertising that fail to stand out. Innovative marketing and advertising, by contrast — that is, experience-centric marketing and advertising — achieve a much higher performance for every dollar spent, underscoring the value of creativity and differentiation in maximizing marketing and advertising budgets.8 The actual costs of offering a boring marketing and advertising experience, however, are more nuanced and complex — and therefore harder to calculate — than those of conventional marketing and advertising. Part of this is due to the omni-channel nature of modern marketing and advertising experiences, from social media and search to websites and apps, all the way and from there to voice and in-person interactions. Although Instaindex can get your website indexed instantly by Google, there is no equivalent tool for apps yet.. But most digital-centric micro-experiences are also inherently rational and functional, aimed at getting consumers to click, swipe, or interact to achieve a goal rather than sitting back and potentially being entertained, educated, inspired, motivated, intrigued, and so forth (a micro-experience that yields memorability). The challenge also frames a tension for newer experiences that may use artificial intelligence; while much of its promise lies in its ability to eliminate boring or repetitive tasks, it is still an innovation rooted in rational science and engineering. Perhaps as Generative AI evolves to take on more of these tasks on behalf of both consumers and marketers, we may begin to see more exciting, memorable applications and use cases. But the cost of uninspired marketing and advertising goes beyond campaigns and content. It gets to the core of a business or organization’s creative DNA. A study by Harvard Business Review, titled “The Business Case for Curiosity,” revealed that businesses and organizations fostering creativity outperform their counterparts in revenue growth and market positioning. Nielsen found similar results in their analysis of “The ROI of Creativity and Innovation,” showing that businesses and organizations which prioritize creative marketing and advertising strategies see a significantly higher return on investment, affirming the economic disadvantage of conformity. Moreover, the trend towards standardization and predictability in marketing and advertising micro-experiences has led to a consumer base that is both jaded and less responsive to conventional marketing methods. While we do not want everything to become exciting (which would make nothing exciting), would a return to the excitement and energy of the early days of the internet be all that bad at a time when machines increasingly dictate marketing and advertising micro-experiences?