{"id":12454,"date":"2015-01-09T18:00:31","date_gmt":"2015-01-09T17:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=7028"},"modified":"2015-01-09T18:00:31","modified_gmt":"2015-01-09T17:00:31","slug":"why-marketing-has-a-branding-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/why-marketing-has-a-branding-problem.html","title":{"rendered":"Why Marketing Has a Branding Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"I<\/p>\n

Isn’t it the ultimate irony?\u00a0The word Marketing is often used to indicate\u00a0a\u00a0lack of meaningful content, as in “no, I want real content, not just a marketing piece.”<\/p>\n

That’s not marketing, that’s BAD marketing—but it’s clear that there’s a lot of it around. As part of my job as an innovation evangelist<\/a>, I personally have to wade through huge amounts of professionally-produced yet stultifyingly boring content.<\/p>\n

Why is there so much of this marketing mush in the world? Here are just some of the reasons:<\/p>\n

Marketers don’t realize\u00a0they’re being boring.<\/strong>\u00a0Too many marketers never get to talk to customers. Because they don’t know enough about what customers\u00a0really\u00a0care about, and don’t have time to follow industry trends, they unwittingly create materials that miss the point, or cover ground already done to death by others.<\/p>\n

Limited analytics<\/strong>. It’s hard to objectively measure the quality of most marketing materials. The complexity of today’s sales cycles means it’s extremely difficult to pick apart the importance of any one piece of content. This in turn means each new piece is just a stab in the dark, making it hard for marketers to learn what really works.<\/p>\n

Poor incentives.<\/strong> Even if good analysis systems are in place, it’s commonplace for marketing people to be rewarded on whatever numbers are most easily derived, rather than real effectiveness.\u00a0In particular, marketers get rewarded for:<\/p>\n