Know-How Exchange : Customer Behavior

Starting simple with the most basic structure of two elements, I was taught there are (1) target customers and (2) benefit offers. Of course, this is probably too broad to be practical for your purposes. And not every sales and marketing category will logically fit into one or the other of these two buckets. Still brainstorming with a white board (using a daisy wheel construct for each?) might be an interesting exercise to get some further insights into your process and goals.

Hi again. Sometimes the basics can get overlooked - this is the Wikipedia offering on marketing. By no means comprehensive, it is certainly a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing

I am still trying to get my head around your comparison between marketing and agriculture - I keep coming up with objections, only to find them already categorized in one way or another. I am assuming that your understanding of agriculture goes a lot deeper than the broad overview you have given. I don't need to ask if your marketing experience does ;-)

Marketing is essentially communications - and the one thing I notice is that most marketers don't listen. Just look at any page of Google and you will find people telling others what they do - and that's it. There is no fine-tuning of their message to their market, generally speaking. In your scheme of things this comes under plowing and inspection. Well, sort of. It is, after all what a farmer does with his crops - he tends them, weeds them, only he does so when needed and also if he is really clever, proactively. He will notice that there is a touch of potato blight in that not-so-well-drained corner of the field where it always happens first. Having seen it, he treats the entire crop. Many marketers don't notice these little things and just chug away.

Another thought, again from my own experience as a grower is that no two plants are ever the same. In marketing this is the USP - no two people are the same and this goes for business too. What's more no two situations are ever the same. Yet when you look at an oak leaf, it still looks like an oak leaf even if there has never been one like it before - nor will there ever be one quite like it ever again. That's why we sweep them up in autumn without taking much notice: doing this with marketing is a serious mistake. That it is all too common can't be blamed on me! My point is that a situation can be characterized and whilst this needn't be logical and can't be proved in any other way than by using statistics - it is true nonetheless. Much of marketing is characterizing situations that go unnoticed by others.

May I be as blunt as to ask the point of your book? After all, there are a lot of books on marketing. This isn't to say that you're wrong to write it*, I just want to know what uniqueness you intend bringing to the field. What is it that Telemoxie can do that nobody else can? What is it that will make this book worth buying - and for whom? (*I have a book in the pipeline too, but not about marketing).

I have to admit that I was a little surprised that you hadn't found the Wikipedia link - but then there are quite a few people who miss out on Solomon's wisdom!

I wrote a whitepaper a while ago called "marketing secrets of the ancients" - only it wasn't really about how Sumerians used cuneiform script in advertising. It was all about how what we think of as modern internet techniques were thought up 100 years ago and more (thinking of split testing and the like).

I can see the tie-in with agriculture - can you do a similar knock-down using proverbs? I happen to think Solomon was really cool. Mind you, he lived in a time that is very distant from our own. After all, there weren't any clocks or fridges back in those days. The concepts of honesty, judgement and trust are the same - and should be respected in our society. That they are not is as much a cause of bad advertising as any.

Are you familiar with what is commonly called the 80-20 principle? Have you ever heard of Benford's First Digit law? These are things that Solomon would have understood intuitively - they are hard enough to put into words today. Actually, harder as people today tend to think in linear terms of push=shove - where in nature this is a very rare and special circumstance (I am no fan of Newton, by the way: he hadn't anywhere near the wisdom of Solomon). 80-20 is one of the most powerful tools of the marketer, and if looked at in the perspective of the farmer, how is it that you always get more yield than you put in by way of energy and fertilizer?

Anyway, it's wonderful to hear you bringing Solomon into the modern world. I trust you will do him justice.

Between 1 and 2, improve the soil. Improve the drainage, or remove rocks and stones, and add fertilizer. There's lots of crap talked in marketing, this is one place in which you PUT shit INTO the ground to help things grow.

Then there's leaving one area fallow. And sowing a crop that you plough back in to again, improve the soil (I know this because I've worked on a farm and because my Dad was a keen gardener).

Let's not forget about the weather: sometimes, your crop will dry up for want of rain, or it will be rained out of the ground, or even your best seeds won't grow. My Dad always used to say that seeds had two chances: they either grow or they don't.

Between 5 and 6, don't forget thinning out (giving the stronger seedlings room to grow by picking out the sicklier sprouts). Then there's weeding and hoeing to get rid of pests and to let air into the soil.

(Aside: The Sandler Submarine has a different take on the sales process: https://www.henrickscorp.sandler.com/pressitems/show/1301/343)

(Aside: A couple of things that I see missing: just because you can grow something doesn't mean that someone wants to eat what you grow (or is willing to pay enough to cover your costs) and distribution (how do you get your offering into the hands of those that want it).)

Here's a nice 4-stage list of marketing stages: https://toolkit.smallbiz.nsw.gov.au/part/21/103/474 or https://books.google.com/books?id=YreJ42YFjb0C&printsec=frontcover (is this the sort of thing you're looking for?)