I’d say 70% of marketing campaigns have little to no real effect. Most certainly they don’t have a positive return in hard currency.
Yet, most marketers spend their time running around, planning all sorts of campaigns and competitions people couldn’t care less of. They are professional producers of spam, where in fact they should be focusing on core of the business: understanding why customers buy, how could they buy more, what sort of products should we make, how can the business model be improved, etc. The wider concept of marketing deals with navigating the current and the future market; it is not about making people buy stuff they don’t need.
To a great extent, I blame the marketing education. In the academia, we don’t really get the real concept of marketing into our students’ minds. Even the students majoring in marketing don’t truly “get” that marketing is not the same as advertising; too often, they have a narrow understanding of it and are then easily molded into the perverse industry standards, ending up in the purgatory of meaningless campaigns while convincing themselves they’re doing something of real value.
But marketing is not about campaigns, and it sure as hell is not about “creating Facebook competitions”. Rather, marketing is a process of continuous improvement of the business. Yes, this includes campaigns because the business cycles in many industries follow seasonal patterns, and we need to communicate outwards. But marketing has so much more to give for strategy, if only marketers would stop wasting their time and instead focus on the essential.
Now, what I wrote here is only based on anecdotal evidence arising from personal observations. It would be interesting, and indeed of great importance, to find out if it’s correct that most marketers are wasting their time on petty campaigns instead of the big picture. This could be done for example by conducting a study that answers the questions:
- What do marketers do with their time?
- How does that contribute to the bottom line?
- Why? (That is, what is the real value created for a) the customer and b) the organization)
- How is the value being measured and defended inside the organization?
If nothing else, every marketer should ask themselves those questions.