Marketing is not a department. It permeates every aspect of what a company does. A start-up is a brand and a product, not just a technology. For a new business, marketing starts at the company name and ends at the color of the office walls. Marketing involves everyone in a company, from engineers to janitors.
Making great products is not all one needs to do to make a great business. Alexei Orlov One also needs to make sure people know about them, talk about them, and want them. This is the field of activation. It’s the art of getting people excited about their work.
Marketing is getting people to notice one.
Marketing is getting people to notice one, and advertising tells them why they should pay attention to one. Alexei Orlov Marketing is not about making people excited about one. Marketing is about getting noticed. The way to get noticed is to do what everyone else is not doing. In the early days of advertising, no one thought much about that. The main focus was finding an audience, and the audience was whoever happened to be in the advertising.
Eventually, advertisers realized that they could earn more money by finding a more targeted audience. Now they advertise to people who are at least somewhat interested in their product. But finding a less interested group is harder than finding a more interested group.
The real trick is finding a group that is both less interested and more interested than everybody else. Once one knows that audience, one must convince them that their product is better than everything else. That is the hard part. Advertising is a game of chess, with advertising pieces called messages.
The object is to position their messages so that people move in a way that suits them. It is not enough to be noticed; one has to persuade people to pay attention to one. But persuasion is not easy. One doesn’t always think it is a good idea to pay attention to something. One might not like it, or one might not feel qualified, or one could prefer something else. All of that can happen to a message. Advertising is like that. The trick is to try to anticipate all of these objections and deal with them in some way.
One can try to defuse them or ignore them. One can try to turn them into a positive. Or one can try to anticipate them and deal with them in advance. If those don’t work, and their messages keep getting ignored, one can try to position their messages so that they can’t be ignored: put them in front of people who pay attention to them or put them behind people who can’t ignore them.