Mark Stevens
Author of Your Marketing Sucks

Your Marketing Sucks

June 22, 2007

Mark Stevens is the author of "Your Marketing Sucks." Mark Stevens’ Marketing Manifesto:

Stop thinking that marketing has to be creative. It has to sell goods and services. Throw out the idea that advertising should be entertaining. Unless you are in the entertainment business, you don’t get paid to entertain the public. You’re supposed to be selling them. If your advertising agency submits its work for Clio Awards, fire the agency. Clio’s are granted on the basis of Hollywood entertainment standards that have nothing to do with sales. You hire advertising agencies to help you sell; not to win their industry’s version of the Oscar.

Engage in zero-base marketing. Instead of simply adding or subtracting x percent from your budget for advertising, public relations, brochures, websites each year, start by questioning which of those initiatives you need at all. If they don’t generate results measured in the growth of your business, kill them. Dead! Insist on a Marketing Moratorium. Halt every marketing initiative you are paying for (unless something is absolutely vital to keeping your doors open) and re-think what you’re spending on marketing and why you’re spending it. The Moratorium should last from a day to a week. You’ll go back in the marketplace wiser… and likely richer. Next time someone tells you to build your company’s "Buzz," tell him a sucker may be born everyday but you’re not one of them. (Try taking Buzz to the bank.)

Stop engaging in marketing that sucks. Any fool can do that… and no one’s ever grown a business wasting their dollars that way. It’s time to apply the same hard-ass discipline that you require of accounting, finance, inventory management and production to the art and science of marketing.