Comments on: Marketing is Math: A Heretic Questions the Gods of Grassroots, Viral Messages, and Sacred Purple Cows

By: Pete Mygatt

Pete Mygatt — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 23:53:03 +0000

I’m an “old-school” marketing type, and a mortgage broker. I’m sold on face-to-face contact, which is harder to do with each new sunrise. For example, how can I offer my services to soon-to-be-divorced couples, who need help with a “property settlement” issues, without seeming to be a heartless business type?
Each business breaks down to the same equation: 1 person selling 1 product to 1 person at 1 time.
Yes or no?
Thanks for wrinkling my brain.

By: Manny

Manny — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:07:49 +0000

Great article. Another term for this fallacy is the “survivorship fallacy”. It doesn’t mean cause and effect is inoperative, but really outstanding results (be it the lottery or the NBA) are extremely rare. Super success is off-the-scale rare, although you can expect good results from good old fashioned hard work. In my own field, I found that good, responsive service brought great results, even if the product was not the most unsual on the planet.
You can always overserve as I mention here:
http://successbooks.blogspot.com/2006/11/success-methodologies-start-current-job.html

By: Becky Carroll

Becky Carroll — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 18:23:38 +0000

Thanks for your thought-provoking post. Marketing is about more than just word of mouth referrals, I agree. Referrals can be an important part of growing the business. So can increasing your share of wallet of existing customers. Many companies forget to do the math on their current customers and focus on getting new ones, while in the meantime, the existing customers leak out the other end.

By: zane

zane — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:59:17 +0000

It’s always good to take things with a grain of salt. You’ve got an excellent post here. It’s spot on.

My series on WOM was to show your marketing gurus aren’t needed. Only you and your people in your company know your brand, what’s best for it, what tools are best for it. Trust them.

By: laurence haughton

laurence haughton — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 17:49:28 +0000

Marketing is math. And pretty fundamental math at that. That’s the message the media has ignored. It’s crazy to say that new advertising media is displacing the old advertising media. The math explains it all. The old advertising media disappointed it’s clients repeatedly. And they did little to figure out why and what to do. So new advertising media is getting a chance. But if it fails to meet and exceed client expectations the new media will fall even faster.

By: Daniel Sweet

Daniel Sweet — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:45:18 +0000

Viral / WOM Advertising is a lot like using a PR guy to get you ink in magazines and newspapers. It’s highly dependent on what the news of the day is (slow news day?), whether your product / service seems relevant (and not to the market – to the recent journalism student), and how you’ve presented your press release.

It doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile to pursue, it just means that money in does NOT necessarily equal promotion out.

The trick to advertising is, as one marketing guru of mine put it, “to get inside the conversation already occurring in your prospect’s head”.

Thanks for being a little contrarian here. It’s good to see marketing folk who recognize (and can publicly admit) that perfectly conceptualized ads can fall flat just as easily (and maybe more so) as they can succeed.

Dan

By: Kareem

Kareem — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 11:22:53 +0000

It’s all in a name, I think if you had been telling people about a great doughnut/pizza/bagel eaterie, the W.O.M could have worked, but people probably don’t know what a Kolache is so the message gets distorted, and loses simplicity.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 07:41:14 +0000

Thanks for saying what needed to be said. I wonder if anyone would be brave enough to look for winning factors in great ideas that have failed.

If they did that there wouldn’t be many books or articles published on how to succeed because all to often it just depends … on things you can’t quantify.

By: Adam Jusko

Adam Jusko — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 04:22:51 +0000

Nice post. Not everything goes viral because not everything deserves to go viral. Some things go viral with creators that have no marketing sense whatsoever—they just create something that large groups of people love. And some things are easier to market in one sentence than others—expecting blogs or other virtal avenues to do all the work for you is not a winning strategy.

By: Frank

Frank — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 02:45:30 +0000

Nice to see you challenging conventional wisdom again. It’s been awhile and I thought maybe you had gone soft.