The key to marketing? Make awesome stuff.
“So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.” – Matt Haughey (via daringfireball)
What a novel idea! People like to talk about awesome stuff. In my experience, marketing, as well as senior management, is often cut off from building of the actual product or service. To make matters worse, they often don’t even use the product they are trying to sell. You need to eat your own dog food if you have any chance of improving it.
This is why we shouldn’t bail out most of these firms. I’m not saying we don’t need a stimulus plan. Obviously, we need to pump up the economy and, as governments have done since ancient Rome, the best way to do that is to inject funds into the economy.
But, tell me, why are we donating billions to GM, a company that has steadfastly refused to build better, more efficient, more desirable products? What is we injected a fraction of that money into an upstart like Tesla Motors, who produce a high-performance, beautiful, no-emissions electric car? Why do we have to bail out failing organizations (and their executives) who have shown that they can only do well, when the economy is doing well, but then want to take no blame when things tank?
And, on the marketing side, we spend all our time trying to figure out what makes one product distinct from another, when there really is no differentiator. Wouldn’t our marketing be so much more effective if there were actually a difference between the products?
Such a novel idea. If only you could make everyone believe in such a thing…