Woody Allen’s movie Match Point explores how a tiny twist of fate – the final rotation of a twirling gold ring, which will determine if it will disappear forever in the river or settle on land to be discovered later by detectives – can have gargantuan implications down the road. Literature imitates life: The outsized implications of small decisions occur all the time in the realm of marketing, determining the ultimate success or failure of products and services.
The George Foreman Grill is one of the great product launches of recent times. It sold more than 100 million units, and netted Foreman more than $200MM cash – more money than he made in his entire championship boxing career. He became extraordinarily wealthy selling what is a simple, and quite frankly unremarkable, cooking appliance.
While you’re probably familiar with the product, you likely don’t know that the product absolutely flopped out of the gate. The original commercials for it started with brief clips of George boxing, seeking to trade on his huge success in that arena. Consumers didn’t respond, and Foreman and his partners came very close to giving up.
They decided to give it one last try, replacing the boxing clips with scenes of Foreman cooking and enjoying a home life with his large and photogenic family. Sales instantly took off, and continued soaring for more than a decade. The difference between bankruptcy and riches?: A few seconds at the beginning of a commercial.
Your potential customers are busy, they are distracted, and they are hard to convince. As true as all of that was a decade ago, it is far truer today as new technologies bombard each of us with data and media all day long. While you can’t win without a strong product or service, equally important are the subtleties of marketing, which if fine-tuned precisely right – but only if fine-tuned precisely right — can allow you to break through the noise, get people to notice, and convince them to open their wallets and give your offering a try. Further compounding (and confounding) the problem, marketing is three parts art and only one part science: There is no book in which you will find the right answer.
Are you investing enough in hiring, retaining, and integrating into your company the very (repeat: very) best marketing people? Are you investing enough time – of you and others – to study, think, analyze, and refine the very best possible marketing message – and then refine it again, and again, and again, based on feedback from the marketplace? The work may not be sexy, but like Woody’s Allen twirling ring, it will make all the difference.
You wouldn’t send your product to market without ensuring it the best offering possible. Are you doing the same with your marketing?
