Page 44 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

Tactics don’t complete a process; they continue to shape one. Tactics
sometimes are the end, the beginning, and the middle. Most important, tactics
play a critical role—often the critical role—in information gathering. By
contrast, you can’t learn from your strategy. It’s just sitting there pretending it
knows what it’s talking about, while your tactics are out there getting battle-
tested by the market.

I once advised a consultant who was vacillating among several reasonable
marketing tactics. I had a button printed with two words of advice for him:

Do Anything.

Fallacy: Build a Better Mousetrap

We still believe that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will start lining up
on your porch. But too many examples today—computers and watches, to name
two—suggest otherwise.

The computer industry has been packed with great ideas that were sitting in
back rooms until someone dragged them out the door and pushed them with a
passion. Xerox invented the mouse, icons, and windows. The ideas were great;
but they were only ideas. Only Apple’s passionate belief in those ideas put them
into play—into the Macintosh computer—and changed the world.

This theme also played out with watches in the 1970s. The Swiss actually
invented the quartz-powered digital watch, but held off introducing it. Then
Hattori of Japan took the digital technology and started smashing the Swiss over
the head with it, almost eliminating them from the watch market, with which
“Swiss” had been synonymous for decades.

Consider the converse: If you execute your idea without passion, others will
think you lack confidence in the idea, and they will lose confidence, too.

Execute passionately. Marginal tactics executed passionately almost always
will outperform brilliant tactics executed marginally.

Fallacy: There’ll Be a Perfect Time (The Bedrock Fallacy)

The too-typical planning effort can be illustrated by the fable of Bedrock Wheel
Company.

Some Neanderthals were working on developing a wheel. Design toiled on
different concepts— oblongs, rounded rectangles, and so forth—while Planning