My husband has a saying that gets a person’s attention. When someone gets extremely upset, he’s prone to say that “they cried like a little girl.” I see marketing brilliance in his comment. Before you ship it – can you make the market cry like a little girl?

Who is She?
The market – that entity into which you launch your best ideas, your hard earned money, your hopes and dreams. Sometimes she responds with eager greed – think My Space or Amazon or eBay. Most of the time – she’s one picky eater. You work hard, make it great and spend months trying to get her to even take a bite. She nibbles on the corners and two years later she rejects it all together.

Status Quo Marketing
How many marketing efforts involve:

1. The task of turning the features into benefit statements
2. Creating programs within each function of marketing to have a “comprehensive marketing mix”
3. Launching the product into the atmosphere and getting immediate market acceptance followed by increasing revenue streams.

What? That didn’t happen? Well, quite honestly, if huge market acceptance happened with every product and service every time, wouldn’t marketing people be the first to ensure the ROI analysis was done? “What? ROI? Oh – sorry – no time. We had to move on to the next product.”

Key to marketing — it’s how loud we can make the market cry. The market (people) have oh, about 10,000,000 unmet needs. About 500,000 of these needs they aren’t aware of - yet. It’s up to marketing people to see the future and get the people to tap into their yet “unmet needs bank” and make a huge withdrawal. Create the vacuum so strong they can’t remember how the world got along without your upcoming who-zee-what’s-it.

Marketing: whipping the market into a frenzy. Not 3 features, 3 benefits. Not programs or initiatives. Marketing is about the market – making it cry like a little girl.