I read a great book a few years back written by the former Vice President of
marketing for Coca-Cola. His name is Sergio Zyman. He was the man responsible for one of the most famous TV commercials of
his era.
It was the one where Mean Joe Green had just finished a bad football game and a kid hands him a
bottle of Coke on the way to the locker room. You may remember, then MJG threw his football jersey to the boy and said ‘hey
kit, catch.’
Mr. Zyman qualified that particular commercial as ‘award winning’ in his book.
However, the point he wanted to make was that even though the commercial made people feel good, and even though it won an
award, and even though they used a football star in the ad, the commercial did not raise cokes sales.
Coca Cola
pulled the advertisement off the air after only six weeks, and they never ran the commercial again!
The purpose of any type of marketing for business is to get more clients. The marketing catch phrase is ’To sell
more of your product or service more often, and make more money.’ As a business person you will invest your time, and
oftentimes money, into getting window washing accounts.
The point is that at some moment in time you will
want to re-evaluate any particular type of marketing you do, and then be willing to jettison it if it does not produce the
results you need. For example, you may have paid for your business to be listed on some on-line directory for one year
and not received any leads, or maybe just a few.
At some point you may want to strongly consider not investing
any more of your money into a second yearly contract even though they will strongly advise you to continue. Simply put,
your marketing must be results oriented, or you will continue to waste more time and money!
