I feel sorry for marketing professionals. I’ve spent a career sitting in marketing meetings that wander aimlessly, bouncing from one idea to the next. Meetings that should be short and productive last for hours on end with no clearly defined outcome. Marketing has a specific language and a specific process, just like accounting. When people don’t know the language and process of marketing, meetings become stressful, unproductive and exhausting. If everyone just knew basic marketing concepts and followed a clearly defined process, things would run so much smoother.
Unfortunately, most marketers don’t know the basic language of marketing or follow a repeatable process. There are reasons for that. To start with, about half of all marketers never learned basic marketing. They went to school for something else. The other half—those with marketing degrees—forgot most of what they learned. Marketing textbooks are crammed with so much extraneous information that students are forced to temporarily memorize material in order to keep their GPA high. I know that because I used to teach principles of marketing in my spare time.
You’d think with all the books that have been written about marketing you could find one that made marketing simple to understand and execute. But that’s not the case. As a fellow marketer who has owned a highly successful agency for the last 30+ years, I’ve seen so much junk marketing advice that it’s like a parade of the blind leading the blind. You really can’t trust most of it. Textbooks are padded; fad books are just fads; and 1001 idea books only add to the confusion.
Imagine if your accounting department didn’t know accounting terms and didn’t follow a process. That’s exactly what’s going on with marketing and its toll is confusion, stress and loss of productivity.
You might think by the title, “The CEO’s Guide to Marketing,” that I wrote this book to teach basic marketing terms and process to CEOs. That’s not the case. I wrote it to teach people working in the field of marketing. However, as a CEO myself, I feel CEOs should know that most marketers know a lot less about marketing than they let on. I don’t want to be rude but if you’ve been in marketing meetings you know they are often hijacked by loud mouths and scatterbrains who couldn’t market their way out of a paper bag.
My suggestion to all marketers is buy this book and read it 3 times. It will make you the smartest marketer in any room and allow you to put an end to the madness. It’s colorful; you can read it cover to cover in less time than most marketing meetings take; and it explains marketing simply. I’ve used everything in this book to help our agency control the marketing process and produce better results for our clients.
You should be mindful that your CEO might buy this book and quiz you on it. Sorry about that but CEOs should know what’s going on in marketing.
I’ll make you this promise: If you read this book 3 times like I said to do, you will know more about marketing than anyone in any marketing meeting you’ll be in, you will have much less stress on the job, and you will be much more likely to advance in your career.
