Monkey See, Monkey Do Will Make a Monkey Out of You

When Marketing, Use Your Head

When Marketing, Use Your Head

The latest Robert Hruzek group project is What I Learned From Bloopers. Ah – finally a topic I can sink my teeth into. Here’s a major “oops” from my early days as a marketing manager, which proved to be a very expensive learning experience.

Yellow Page Ad Bleeds Red Ink

The good news was … when I started out as a marketing manager, I was given a lot of rope. The bad news was … I immediately went out and almost hanged myself.

We were trying to sell more brown boxes, which were quite profitable at the time. Problem was, our usual methods – sales calls, brochures, seasonal promotions – weren’t generating much growth.

I started doing some research and discovered that many of our competitors, including the top distributors in our market, had huge Yellow Page ads (this was in the 1980s, when the B2B Yellow Pages were all the rage).

So I immediately jumped to reached the conclusion that Yellow Page advertising was The Answer. I summoned the Yellow Pages sales rep, who used testimonial after testimonial illustrating the awesome selling power and ROI of his ads. (My first clue should have been none of the testimonials was from a firm promoting our product line.)

If everyone was doing it, we should too, I reasoned. So I bought an ad. Cost – $10,000. To put this in perspective, our entire marketing budget up to this point was somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000.

Nine months later, I was in an executive meeting and someone asked me how the Yellow Page ad was doing. That was the one question I was hoping nobody would ask. I was forced to report that after nine months, we had obtained two orders generating about $200 in gross profit. Miraculously I was allowed to continue marketing, but they were still razzing me about it 10 years later. While most of the jesting was good natured, I can’t help but feel the episode made my superiors less inclined to let me innovate.

In Marketing, There’s No Substitute for Thinking

Anyone in marketing knows that testimonials are extremely persuasive. People are inclined to do what they see others do, especially if those others are respectable members of the business community. While testimonials have a role in decision making, they can only take you so far. Rather than be swayed by appearances and superficial comparisons, this is what I should have done.

  • Ask the Yellow Pages rep for endorsements from companies in my industry, preferably for advertisements featuring my product line.
  • Attempt to find out if these gigantic ads were getting results for my competitors. (As time went on, I discovered that they were generally flops.)
  • Survey our new brown box customers to determine how they found us and why they bought from us. (I would have discovered the predominant reason was word of mouth.)
  • Observe that our average order size was less than $300, leading to the conclusion that an acceptable ROI would require an unrealistically high response rate.

Instead, this is what I did.

  • Allowed myself to be led where I wanted to go. I wanted to imitate my top competitors and I wanted to do something different.
  • Made my decision more or less in isolation, rather than involve colleagues with greater business experience.
  • Used my communication skills to sell a weak argument instead of using my analytical skills to construct a good argument.

Maybe if my mistake had been smaller, I wouldn’t have learned so much. Still, today’s business climate is more pressure packed than I ever remember it. Maybe this post will help someone else learn the lesson without squandering the money.

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