1. Lack of purpose
Can you define what is the purpose of advertising? What about marketing? How about your colleagues, how they define the purpose advertising and marketing? If you think this is a not problem, ask the people next to you, what they think the advertising is suppose to do?
2. Lack of goals
This is easy. Yet, who has clear goals for their marketing? Some companies decide they don't need marketing people at all, since their products are made by engineers and are too complicated for anyone except for engineers to understand. The problem is that without setting goals it's impossible to know if you hit your mark or not. And without proved marketing results it is easy to say 'we don't need marketing people.' You can put it this way, do you need sales? Start from your goals.
3. Lack of measurement
How do you define success in marketing? You spent 2,3 million dollars to a multichannel advertising campaign? Is that success? Marketing budget spent? Can you show what worked – and why? Or are you just guessing? By the way, if you missed the second point, measuring is useless. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said it best, “Advertising is the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America.”
4. No strategy
Who needs to think about marketing strategy, when you can hire people to do it for you? They can sort it out, right? Wrong. Strategy, the plan to get from A to B, changes every time if you leave it only to your marketing people. All successful companies have been consistent with their strategy for decades. Only fools change something which has proved to be successful.
5. Spending, not investing your marketing budget
Do you see the marketing as a cost or as an investment? The answer tells an awful lot about you. When you consider marketing as investment, you demand 1) growth, and if you are like me, 2) dividends. Please remember that you can't save yourself to success.
6. Poor execution
Translation for poor execution in my dictionary is an amateur approach. You use artists for advertising, when you should have hired an agency of salesmen. This leads to lack of testing, which is the mother of all mistakes in marketing.
7. Ego
As soon as you think you know, you stop learning. Arrogance is one of the biggest reasons why businesses fail. It shows as poor communication, attitude and relationships. A formula for destruction. Too often when you become successful you close your mind for new ideas. The ego is permits you to admit your mistakes or accept other opinions.
What would you add to this list?
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