You Ask, I Answer: Not Ready for Marketing?

In today's episode, Steven asks, Have you ever told a prospective client that they're not ready for marketing? What were your reasons for turning them away? Um yes, although typically it's was because they weren't ready for specific type of marketing, not marketing as a whole. Uh telling someone, for example, they're not ready for email marketing if they've not been collecting any email addresses, or they're not ready for social media marketing because they haven't quite figured out how to be a useful member of the community. Those are the typical reasons for uh not using a certain marketing channel, uh, or a certain marketing method or set of tactics.

It always came down to uh preparation, foundation, uh a plan of some kind, uh, and those are the typical failures. Now for marketing as a whole, that's more a company's not ready for marketing when they haven't done the four Ps. So if you don't remember from your marketing textbook in college, uh the four Ps are product price promotion placement, right? It is do you have a product? Is it priced appropriately for the market?

Uh are you promoting it? And then where you uh where are you promoting it? Um and typically somebody would not be ready for marketing when those four fundamentals are not in place, but specifically the product is not ready. Product market fit is probably the most important overlooked thing that marketers and companies in general don't do well, especially in startups. Uh if you look at all the the new business pitches at various uh startup incubator demo days, a lot of the times to be charitable, there they're solutions in search of a problem.

Uh the Uber for French fries, for example, not really sure we need that. Uh there's there's there may be a mild interest in that, but for the most part, the product doesn't have a home in the heart of the consumer, and it'd be very difficult to be very difficult to get really great marketing for a product like that because people may say, Oh, that's cool, and then not buy it. Right. We ran into this in the early days uh with uh my company, Trust Insights. We would focus a lot on AI and machine learning, and people are like, wow, that's really cool, but then didn't want to buy any of the services we had attached to that.

So uh after about the after the first year, we really pivoted looking at what our customers were asking us about, uh looking at the problems in the marketplace to really focus much more on marketing analytics. I personally focus on marketing data science and AI, but the market's not ready, right? The product market fit was off, even though people think it's cool, even though people think it's interesting. At the end of the day, AI and marketing is kind of like spreadsheets and marketing. It's a technology, it's not a solution that's complete unto itself.

Say adding AI to your marketing doesn't mark make your marketing any better. So if you have a prospective client that fails one or more of the four P's in your marketing mix, that's a good indication that they're not ready to begin the process of marketing. They need to price their product appropriately. Their product has to be worth buying. Uh, they need a plan for promotion.

Uh, they need to understand the place of the marketing, and there are plenty of companies, even companies that are relatively mature, where that product market fit and the four Ps start to drift. Really good example of this is uh the former and and almost completely gone uh Blockbuster video. They thought that they were in the video business, they were actually in the plastic cassette distribution business. And when a company came that recognized the marketplace had changed its tur its idea of where place was based, namely people wanted video at their homes and they and having DVDs that could be mailed to them, uh was a critical and oversight, right? Their product market fit for a couple of decades was great, and their marketing mix for a couple decades was great, and then it wasn't.

They the market changed, they didn't. So even a company that is in uh production that is maybe even a mature company, can drift apart from the marketplace itself. And so the four Ps are something that you can't do once, launch your company and then hope that uh you attract the customers you attract, even if you're successful, you have to constantly be keeping an eye on the marketplace and say, What are we still in alignment with the market? Or has the market changed on us? I was talking to a customer not too long ago uh dealing with the hotel stuff, and like, yeah, the our our our hotel business line is not growing.

Like, well, yeah, have you heard of this thing called Airbnb? Uh it's eating your market share. Of course, the there's a a clear case of out of sync issues with the market. So in those cases, a company should stop marketing or scale back drastically and figure out how to realign with the markets and then go back into doing marketing. But yeah, they they should not be doing marketing if they don't understand what's happening with the market itself.

Marketing we use as a verb in a lot of cases. Um but it is also we forget that now the market is who we are marketing to. So how do you handle telling your client this? Start with a framework like the four Ps or uh PESEL or Porter's Five Forces or uh four Ps and illustrate clearly to the client, perspective or not, where the market is, where they are, and which one of these pieces within the framework that you choose is seriously broken in it and will be a waste of their marketing dollars. As always, please leave your comments in the comments box below.

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