Smart Small > Big Dumb

Most marketing advice really really sucks.

Had someone (I’ll leave his name out) try to teach me about marketing. He seemed like he knew what he was talking about. So I tried to implement what I learned.

It was an unmitigated disaster.

Didn't get clients. Hardly got anyone to even look at the ads.

Then the ad salesman told me the problem: "You need to run your ad more. Yeah, you should run it very often. Veeeeeerrrrrrryyyyy often"

Made sense. The guy got paid every time the ad ran. I'd say the same thing. This was not the solution though. It made me wonder why so many people had this outlook on mass marketing.

Took me a while to figure out that in university they teach the strategy that companies like Coca Cola use right now.

Just blast your ad and hope for the best.

Only issue is that Coca Cola has a 600 million dollar ad budget. And mine was like 600 dollars.

If you water a strategy down by a factor of one million it doesn't tend to do as well.

Also, Coca Cola has 10,000 people in their marketing department. I had one. Which was me. And I also had to do everything else!

So I started to look into the question of: 'how do big companies get so big?'. You don't go from zero to 600 million budget without doing something right... right?

After a whole lot of research I figured out that they all roughly use the same formula.

They don't start out running mass media 'brand awareness' ads. They start out hammering home a USP and using mostly direct response ads.

Coca Cola started out using coupons, forcing distribution and selling a whole lot of sugar water as a result.

Turns out that big dumb companies start out as small smart companies. Then they hit critical mass, the board of directors takes over, HR comes on, middle management entrenches itself, there's unlimited budget and the stupidness begins. 

Now - if you're reading this and you have a $600 million budget - that's awesome. Congratulations, I salute you. Just run any ad, it'll be fine. Wave to me when you fly overhead in your private jet.

If you're not at that level yet, you probably want to make sure your ads have some ROI. So you should check out my report on USPs. It shows you how small, smart companies grew at rapid rates using clever marketing.

Here's the link: https://www.clarenceresults.com/usp-report

Talk soon,

Liam

P.S. No P.S. this time. So it's like Schrodingers P.S. If there is a P.S. that says there's no P.S... is there really a P.S.?