Marketing in the Time of Cholera
Fundamentals For Thriving in a Toxic Economy
Conceiving or Believing
I often hear people proposing ideas in marketing that I just find unrealistic. Somehow people believe marketing is an unlimited group with unlimited resources that can take any idea and run with it. Ultimately marketing is a zero sum game and you can only do a certain amount of things. My analogy is that each hour in the day, times the number of people you have, are like soldiers in the battlefield. The last thing you want to do is waste soldiers lives on meaningless objectives. Just you can “conceive” that they could take a hill doesn’t mean that you “believe” it can actually happen. New ideas are great, but they must be put against a litmus test of whether they can actually be accomplished. Generals who order lives of their soldiers to be wasted on hills that can’t be conquered are those who should be stripped of command. Toss out new ideas. Take risks. But don’t waste the limited amount of time you have on things that are not going to drive impact for your company. Conceiving is not believing.
