Do you know that Viagra was developed as a blood pressure drug?
And although it didn't work the way it was supposed to, but had some interesting side effects on men.
Some carnally challenged men managed to get and keep their instruments up.
So, now there was a remedy but there was no epidemic-calibre illness to remedy.
Well, never mind. The advertising industry can always help.
Just as many years ago the fashion industry invented cellulite, Pfizer, with the help of BBDO, one of the world's largest advertising agencies, invented "erectile dysfunction".
And from then on, it was up to BBDO to turn the freshly invented "dysfunction" into an earth-shattering epidemic that could wipe out mankind in just a few decades.
This is exactly how I see some new-fangled marketing concepts like inbound marketing, content marketing, digital marketing, conversion copywriting and some other retarded ideas based on solid concepts that marketers have been practising for decades.
Content marketing has been in existence since John Deere first published its newsletter, The Furrow, in 1895.
The whole idea of the newsletter was that people would read it, learn about the root causes of their experienced symptoms and how to remedy them and learn about some products /services that could help them to solve their problems.
The difference was that at that time, companies put value on good writing.
Why?
Because they recognised that selling John Deere products through the power of the written word was much more profitable than selling through an army-sized sales force.
After all, unlike salespeople, sales copy doesn't need vacation, sick leave, maternity leave and other assortments of leaves. Also, unlike salespeople's performance, the performance of sales copy is pretty consistent.
Just consider that in the typical B2B sales force...
For sales copy, the Wall Street journal's "Two Young Men..." letter is a great example.
Martin Conroy wrote it in 1974 and the WSJ mailed it for 25 years non-stop. And the letter generated over $2 billion in new revenue.
The other example of good writing was when, in 1908, advertising savvy agency owner Thomas Lasker, hired copywriter Claude C. Hopkins for an annual salary of $186,000 (A fully tenured Harvard professor was making about $1,000 a year) and together, they built Lord & Thomas into the world's largest advertising agency.
By the time of his retirement in 1942, Lasker made over $627 million in today's dollars.
Yesterday, businesses used reasonable volume of high quality content to inform and educate readers with the intention of eventually selling something.
The means were "inform" and "educate" and the end was "sell".
Today, businesses use an incredible volume of easily available, mass-produced, cheap content to inform, educate and entertain their readers.
The means is sheer volume and the end is to get Facebook likes, Twitter follows and LinkedIn connects. And how do companies stay in business if no one actually sells? Well, unlimited rounds of investors' money.
And companies with hundreds of trillions of likes, follows and connects go out of business on a daily basis.
This is where the erectile dysfunction of modern marketing comes in.
Just as with human erectile dysfunction, the position is filled but there is no production.
Firms have their marketing departments, but instead of generating sales leads and contributing to revenue-generation, the marketing folks get busy producing more and more content... for inventory.
They are not read, but at least, those content pieces are "out there".
And when the question comes up why they are producing all that – mainly useless - content, they say they need to do something to get through the day in order not to die of boredom.
And as long as they're busy producing content, no one bugs them to generate sales leads. After all, most marketing people wholeheartedly hate sales.
Have you noticed that in most IT service firms the marketing and sales folks are held to drastically different performance KPIs?
Most marketing KPIs are based on marketing activities, like number of blog posts written and published. Number of social media entries posted, etc. There is almost zero regard for market response/lack of response of activities.
By contrast, most sales KPIs are based on market activities, like return of application questionnaires, request for meetings and generated revenue.
And when the end of the fiscal period comes, top management mercilessly beats up the sales `folks for missing revenue goals, while the marketing folks get praised for "churning" out half a billion blog posts... that no one has ever read.
Realistically, sales folks could perform a lot better but, since 80-90% of marketing collateral, prepared by marketing, is considered useless for salespeople (American Marketing Association. Proceedings of the Customer Message Management Forums. 2003), so sales folks spend as much as 40% of their time re-creating and correcting collaterals that marketing has prepared for them (CMO Council Study, 2004).
Why doesn't marketing help sales folks to modify and re-create those documents?
Because they don't have time. They have received their quota of blog posts, logos and other lunacies from top management and they have to do that... or else.
In my experience, more often than not, the problem is that the CMOs in many IT service firms are skilled in institutional marketing and modern marketing fads, like content marketing, digital marketing, inbound marketing and account-based marketing, but have never studied and applied good, old-fashioned direct response marketing.
Nowadays it's become fashionable to say that direct response marketing is pushy and today's audience wouldn't tolerate it.
It's not pushy but selective.
And its selective nature is built into its call to action (CTA) and response vehicle.
For people who are still shopping around, we can use a soft CTA, like "click here to download our tip sheet, white paper, etc." It's free content. It's for readers who suffer from the proverbial paper cut and there is no urgency to address the bleeding.
For people who are ready to buy, we can use a hard CTA, like "click here to talk to a consultant". It's a paid consulting session for readers who suffer from the proverbial spear in the chest and are bleeding out pretty fast. They have utmost urgency to stop the bleeding.
The soft CTA is great to build an email list and the hard CTA is great for acquiring clients.
The key is the balanced application of both types CTAs, so your firm can do both list building and client acquisition.
So if you want to address the erectile dysfunction of your marketing, you have to introduce this call to action concept and you have to clearly ask people what to do when they've finished reading a piece of your content.
This direct response element allows them to qualify/disqualify themselves depending on whether they are bleeding from a paper cut or from a spear to the chest.
Well now, in your firm, who qualifies your prospects? Your salespeople at the end of the sales cycle or your content right from the beginning?
I encourage you to try the latter approach and you end up with better clients with more interesting and profitable projects.
You can also check whether your firm is more of a fungible vendor or a respected IT authority: Peddler Quiz
In the meantime, don't sell harder. Market smarter and your business will be better off for it.