Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

The bumper stickers are right: Question Authority. Question alphas.
The Fallacy of Common Sense
A client once told me that “doing a marketing plan is simple. It’s just common
sense.”
Unfortunately, common sense is not that common.
*
What seems common, in
fact, is people acting contrary to their own experience—recall again those people
who accepted VALs in the 1980s. Or worse, people act against their obvious
self-interest—a human habit that inspired an entire book, The Marc h of Folly,
by historian Barbara Tuchman. As famous examples, Tuchman cites Montezuma
surrendering to an Aztec army the size of your high school PE class, and the
Trojans deciding, “Hey, the Greeks left this huge horse behind. Let’s haul it back

---

into our city.”
My client’s faith in common sense was misplaced for another reason. He was
right in thinking that most people possess enough common sense to draw a
logical conclusion from a premise. But in planning, people do not stumble in
reaching conclusions. They err in establishing their premises.
Take Burger King’s stumble, for example.
For years, Burger King operated from these premises: “(a) People come to us
for food, and (b) Most people prefer the taste of flame-broiled burgers.” From
those premises, Burger King executives reached this commonsense conclusion:
“Therefore, we should stress our flame-broiled burgers as the reason to switch to
us.”
Irrefutable logic—but premise (a) was all wrong. People do not go to fast-
food restaurants to satisfy a desire for something delicious. They go for
something fast, cheap, and palatable that satisfies their hunger. Burger King
displayed good common sense, but it cost them millions—because their premise
was all wrong.
Whenever it does show up, common sense helps in any discipline. (My
surgeon father said that 90 percent of orthopedic surgery is common sense.
Woody Allen hinted at the same thing when he said that 90 percent of success is
showing up.) Basically, marketing planning involves a finite number of broad
strategies—create genuine distinction, lead on price, seize an untapped niche and
migrate, and some others—from which some common sense will certainly help
you choose. The hard and critical part comes next.
How do you execute that strategy? How do you fill a niche’s needs? How do
you create uniqueness? How do you interest and convert prospects? Better yet,
how do you interest and convert your own people?
How do you succeed?
In this realm, the realm of tactics, your options are infinite. This makes
common sense virtually irrelevant. At this stage, common sense is a shield rather
than a sword. It can protect you, but it cannot fight the battle.
Common sense did not inspire the great marketing innovations of this century
—the L.L. Bean boot, personal computer, overnight delivery, or any other.
Leaps of imagination created them.