Marketing is just like dating
I didn’t date a lot growing up but I do remember one thing about it, it never went well for me. One of the reasons is I spent more time being scared I was going to blow it with the girl than I spent trying to get to know her. If I had spent some of that time talking to her then maybe I wouldn’t have had some ideas how to keep her interested.
Another mistake I made during my juvenile dating period was asking my buddies for advice. Those bunch of goons didn’t know any more than I did but for some reason I thought they were full of dating wisdom.
Something that’s easy to do in marketing is to depend on the experts to tell us what our customers want. The excerpt below reminds us who we should ask instead…the customer.
Talking to your customers about their experience is the best way to improve — not reading an article on how to make a better white paper. If you don’t ask for feedback from your constituents, then you are simply operating in abstractions instead of reality. You’re also failing to live up to another great law of marketing that was proselytized by the great David Ogilvy: “The consumer is not dumb, she is your wife.” Failing to give your consumers credit for knowing what they like, want, and need is the same as never talking to your spouse and only reading books to make them happy. Does that make any sense? NO! So here it goes: if you want to be better at marketing, stop reading all of the crap people write. Just because a person has a title of CMO, CEO, VP, evangelist, or whatever else they put in front of their name, doesn’t mean they are any smarter than you or have any better insights into your customers.
(via Mashable)
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