What Would Your Business Look Like If You Had More Marketing Wins and Fewer Losses?

How many marketing wins did you record in the last 12 months? How many losses?

Are you even keeping score? Most businesses owners don’t. They only find out the score when it’s too late – when sales bottom out and profits dive into the red and they’re left scrambling.

Marketing is the ultimate game in business. Either you are playing the game and giving it maximum effort or you’re sitting on the sidelines watching your competitors score. Every competitive game has a scoring system to determine the winners from the losers. In the business world its how much profit your marketing generates!

The scoring system of the marketing game is simple: if your marketing generates more sales and profits than it costs to produce you earn a marketing win. If it doesn’t produce enough to cover expenses, it’s a marketing loss. Most business owners have no idea if their marketing is winning or losing. They make the mistake of running ads and promotions and hope one of them will eventually pay off. In the marketing game, hope is not a strategy!

Playing the game can be very aggravating. Your most clever and well planned marketing plays may fail miserably. But you cannot give up and quit playing the game. Every business, no matter their size or stature, experiences marketing losses – think of the infamous “New Coke” or the Edsel fiascoes.

Last time I checked, Coca-Cola and Ford are still in business and spending millions on marketing. Both learned from their mistakes, returned to the fundamentals and tried different direction. So must you!