Ye Old Tricks Work No More
Imagine what the medieval marketplace was like. It was enclosed in the village square. It contained people looking for necessities like food, drink, and clothing. And there are people seeking things to make their life more comfortable, a chair, a sword to defend their castle, or maybe a patch for their leaky cauldron. And there are the merchants, tradespeople, and traders that are trying to exchange their goods and services with those buyers. Sort of like what you might find at the Colorado Renaissance Festival this coming weekend.
The merchants have hired ‘barkers’ to stand on boxes on street corners that try to yell the loudest to grab the buyers’ attention, ‘step-hailers’ to coerce people to visit their establishments, ‘tempters’ to hand out free samples of the local ale, along with plenty of charlatans promoting the latest magical elixir and buyers that in general are greatly confused by it all.
It’s loud, rancorous, unorganized, and perhaps a bit crazy. Some people are having fun, others are hard at work, and still others are completely lost.
Today’s market is still very much the same
The modern marketplace or more simply, ‘the market’ is still much the same.
The market is still enclosed but it’s bigger. It has boundaries where trades occur, but those boundaries are no longer defined by physical dimensions. Now when you need a new cauldron instead of being limited to dealing with your local village smithies, Hob the Hammerman, or Jory of the Anvil, you can now use your own personal Mirror of Many Wares (or your laptop) to consult the Merchant’s Guild (aka the internet) to buy cauldrons made in “The Far Eastern Bazaar”.
And today’s vendors still compete to attract buyers using the same tactics. We still have the criers, the barkers, the step-hailers, and sadly the charlatans. Today we call those people – Marketers.
What kind of Marketer are you?
Are you a Crier, a Barker, a Tempter, a Step-Hailer or a Charlatan? As a marketer, I often lament how our discipline sometimes feels no more advanced—and demands no more skill—than that of our medieval predecessors. Consider your latest marketing effort. I bet like the crier you used tactics to create more brand awareness, or the barker to drive more visits to your website, or step-hailer to create more free trials, and while you might not see it, you’ve hawked the benefits of the latest feature or magical elixir.
This isn’t a critique of marketers. After all, we only do what Hob the Hammerman is expecting us to do.
While Hob no longer makes cauldrons by hammering wrought iron ingots into curved ‘gores’ joined together via forge welding. Today he using CNC milling machines. So why hasn’t marketing changed? While Hob has transformed the process to create his new iCauldrons, he still expects his marketing people to ‘cry’ the loudest to bring in the most customers. Hob creates value by making cauldrons, so if he can make more cauldrons, better and faster, he’s going to change his process.
Marketing people create value by getting attention. And sometimes crying the loudest, still works.
History repeats itself, until it doesn’t
So, for now, Garrick the Goldtongue still gets plenty of work but there’s a new marketer in the marketplace and she’s starting to get a lot more attention. Her name is Mira the Segmenter of the Insight Veil. Mira listens, she observes, she is armed not with a bullhorn, but with insight. When the time is right, she whispers to the buyer, “This is what you were looking for, isn’t it?”.
And while Garrick creates a lot of noise, Mira creates VALUE. Value that comes from helping calm the chaos in the marketplace, shortening buying cycles, more efficiently applying marketing (and sales) resources and ultimately selling many more iCauldrons.
It’s time to forge some new marketing tools
It’s easy to regress and just try to yell the loudest, but if your marketing skills are limited to those of Garrick’s, you’re going to find yourself ‘yielding ground in the merchant’s square’ or in modern terms, you’re going to lose market share. Your customers will become Mira’s and you’ll be hoping that the king still needs a court jester.
If you need some help forging the tools that Mira uses contact me here.