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Folly from some not-so-great marketers versus what the real greats think

Here's a strange story for you.

A few months ago I wrote an e-mail for a firm selling investment advice.

They took forever to get the damn thing out and never told us how it did, but one day sent us an e-mail asking us to adapt it for another firm's list with whom they had a deal.

By accident we saw two revealing insights into why so much marketing is bad.

An internal message said our e-mail was outdoing anything before — which would have been nice to know.

And note from the other firm said their new marketing chief was more interested in brand values than response, so could we make our e-mail shorter and less aggressive.

This reminded me of what the smartest guy with the biggest brand in the world said about marketing.

Sergio Zyman is the former chief marketing officer of Coca-Cola. In five years, when few people thought Coke could sell any more, he and his team increased its sales by 50 per cent, and the share price quadrupled.

You couldn't imagine anyone less like a direct marketer than someone who sells Coca-Cola. Or anyone you might think more dedicated to brand values.

What your job really is

Zyman could teach a lot of direct marketers who hanker after quasi- intellectual tripe about the realities of life.

He said in his excellent (and funny) book "The end of marketing as we know it" that marketers should be "the ultimate stewards of return on investment in assets".

Zyman’s wonderfully down-to-earth definition of the aim of marketing is this: "To get more people to buy more stuff more often at higher prices so the company makes more money".

He says a lot in his book about marketers' lack of intellectual discipline, and the way they fail to set exact targets, talking vaguely about "more" sales, "more" market share but never putting a figure on the increases — saying precisely how much more.

As I always say — though I probably stole it from someone smarter than me — if you aim at nothing, you usually hit your mark.

Boardroom folly

Zyman is particularly critical about the way marketers get into the boardroom and then start being more interested in what goes on there than their customers.

One of his best stories tells how he showed his first Coca-Cola ads in 1993 to his boss Roberto Goizueta, who said, "I don't like those ads."

"Look, Roberto," he replied, "If you're willing to buy 100 per cent of the volume worldwide then I'm happy to do the advertising that you like. Otherwise I've got to keep doing it to those damned consumers."

My favourite quote on this is from one of the great businessmen of the 20th century.

The architect of Sears, Roebuck's rise to become the world's greatest retailer was Julius Rosenwald. He once remarked, "My ambition is to stand on both sides of the counter at once."

I doubt if he ever used the phrase "brand values". He just knew that no matter how important such things may be, "Nothing happens in business until something gets sold."

Who said that? Thomas J Watson Jr. of IBM. Strange how the best people tend to say similar things, isn't it?