It seems a little presumptuous to talk about the death of the internet start-up in a period where we just saw a $19 Billion (with a B!) acquisition of WhatsApp. And it wasn’t that long ago where we saw huge IPOs from Zulily, Tableau and Zillow (and others!). If anything it looks like it’s the golden age of online start-ups. If anything we might be in a bubble, right?

All of that is true, so allow me to be a little more specific. I am claiming it’s a bad idea right now to start an online-only company. Companies like TripAdvisor, Yelp, Zillow, Facebook and Google are all obviously great companies, but trying to build a new company in that space today is a mistake. I am defining an internet company as a business that exists primarily or exclusively on the internet. It’s never been easier to build a new review site or an online tool or an online information product. Partly for that reason it’s never been harder to make that new company successful – and it’s all because of the marketing challenge.

Recently Tim Ferris interviewed a number of new ‘internet start-ups’ that are getting traction. Here is his post. I was ready to jump all over them as exceptions, until I read the post and found out all of them followed my rules about how to NOT be an internet start-up.

“It’s the product, stupid”
– Bill Clinton as I imagine him as a start-up entrepreneur

When I graduated from business school in 2005 everyone who wasn’t going into banking, consulting, real estate or strategy was going to be a brand manager – a marketer. Career preference for the latest class has changed dramatically. Instead of marketing, they all want to be in Product. Product is the new king – and for good reason. More and more marketing is being built into the product. Even if it’s not, marketing a good product is a lot easier than marketing a terrible one (and you feel better about your job too). Why wouldn’t you want to be involved earlier in defining the product characteristics and changes instead of just trying to promote whatever you are handed?

Unfortunately, “Build a better mousetrap and they will beat a path to your door” is the greatest lie ever told to an entrepreneur.

You can build the greatest product in the world, but if you can’t get people to try it, it will fail.

There are generally three ways to get people to try your product:

1. Paid advertising: Lots of people will accept your money to put your product in the hands (or in front of the eyeballs) of your potential consumers
2. “Free” advertising: Sometimes called “earned media”. If your product is interesting enough you might get talked about by the news media (note: You will usually have to pay someone to do this Public Relations). If your website is built well enough you can get listed by Google in their organic listings (note: You will usually have to pay someone to do this SEO Optimization)
3. Word of Mouth: Your product might be interesting enough or built in such a way that users automatically share their use of the product with other users. You still have the challenge of getting it in the hands of the early users, but you can always resort to #1 if this will really cause it to flywheel

Let’s tackle each of them in turn.

#1 Paid Advertising

If your product has strong monetization potential you can get away with paying for traffic, but most start-ups don’t (at least not initially, and at least not strong enough that they can use this to get any degree of scale). If you can build a product and advertise it so that every $1 you spend makes you $1.50 then I am wrong and you should go back to what you were doing (actually rush back to what you were doing! Find all the capital you can and throw it behind your product like crazy! If you need more capital send me an email. Let’s talk.)

In practice, even if your product has great monetization potential, it is very very hard to create an online product that you can advertise profitably from the start. At best it will require lots of testing and adjustments and re-adjustments before you will get close to this point. In most cases you never will.

Many online products don’t even have a plan for monetization. Their goal is to get scale and traction and THEN figure out monetization (Which reminds me a little of the early days of the internet – andthis South Park Episode). If you can’t make revenue off the top then you generally need to focus on techniques #2 or #3.

The most common online-only company these days is a ‘better product’ that turns around and sells someone else’s stuff. In this case you are basically building a “free” product that acts as an advertising vehicle for others (Kayak is a good example). The problem with these companies and using paid advertising is that you are in an “arbitrage” position. You are buying traffic from one source and then turning around and selling it to someone else (maybe after you qualify it). It’s not impossible to do this but it’s getting harder and harder.

Let’s say you have a better way to find a car to buy online. Your tool helps people figure out which car someone should buy and where they should buy it. You want to turn around and sell these customers to car retailers or manufacturers. Great. But how do you get the customers to begin with? If you count on paid advertising you can bet the best terms on Google will be things like “used cars” or “Buying a car in Boston”. Guess who you are competing with for those clicks? The same people you want to sell your customers back to! So you need to be willing to pay more than your customers do for a potential buyer, then qualify that customer somehow so you can turn around and sell them back to your marketing competitors. Impossible? Absolutely not. Really really hard? Yes.

The second type of online-only company is a software solution of some sort. Maybe a tool that helps you better manage your finances that you pay a monthly fee for. First you need to build an awesome product – which is an expensive fixed cost. Now you need to recoup that cost somehow. Since your marginal costs are close to zero, you can either have a small number of customers you charge a lot of money or a large number of customers you charge a small amount of money. The most common method is to give the product away for free and then charge for a premium version (“Freemium”). This works if you have no competitors, but if you do, what do you think their reaction is going to be? They will either build a better product (forcing you to invest to improve your product) and/or reduce their prices. In economics a situation like this pretty quickly reverts to companies charging marginal cost. And what’s your marginal cost? Zero.

Are there ways around these problems? Of course. Kayak solved the arbitrage problem. Hootsuite is getting significant percentage of people to upgrade to their paid product. There are lots of solutions. But all of them are very very hard and have a low likelihood of success.

#2 Free Traffic

You are just going to build a cool product, people are going to link to you and then you will be found on Google. Your traffic (and your marketing) will be free and you can monetize the customers on the other side. This is how Yelp and UrbanSpoon and TripAdvisor all did it (although Trip did do a bunch of paid advertising in the early days to get themselves kick-started).

Well, the internet ain’t what it used to be.

First: All of those companies were really really good at SEO. They had some of the best people in the world doing SEO. And those great people had a big advantage: there wasn’t a lot of competition. At least not as much competition as there is today.

Let’s dive into the UrbanSpoon example.

UrbanSpoon was a restaurant review company who came of age significantly later than Yelp. They had a great team that built a great core product, but their product was only as good as the number of reviews they had. So they did two really smart things:

First, they created a badge system that automatically pulled reviews from food bloggers that put the UrbanSpoon badge on their site. And it gave all sorts of awards and leaderboards for bloggers that joined them. It turns out food bloggers are not in it for the money. They were more than happy to link to and provide content to a professional looking site like UrbanSpoon. This gave US both unique content and high quality links – both essential for SEO.

Second, they analyzed what their competitors were doing and found gaps. Yelp had a great site with content for every city plus the term Restaurants (Seattle Restaurants, Chicago Restaurants, Austin Restaurants, etc.) They were ranking at or near the top for all of those searches – as was CitySearch and TripAdvisor and dozens of others. It would have been very hard for US, as a new site, to compete with those entrenched competitors.

So the team looeds at where they could compete. It turns out that none of these competitors had content categorized by neighborhood. So UrbanSpoon built out thousands of neighborhood pages. Instead of one listing for Seattle Restaurants they had hundreds: Queen Anne Restaurants, Belltown restaurants, Ballard Restaurants, Fremont Restaurants, etc. Then they went further. They created pages for all of the cuisine types combined with all the neighborhoods: Mexican Queen Anne Restaurants. Thai Belltown Restaurants. Chinese take-out Fremont. And so on. But they weren’t done. They found lists of all the landmarks in every city and created pages for them as well: Turkish restaurants near the Space Needle Seattle. Moroccan take-out near the Hilton Hotel downtown Phoenix.

What they did is now called “building out the long tail.”

It worked. With their blogger content and links combined with their long-tail site structure they were able to own a big piece of the Google traffic, and then eventually, as the site became more popular, they were able to move in and compete head-to-head with Yelp on the “head terms”.

So if UrbanSpoon can do it, why can’t your start-up?

Because it’s too late.

The techniques that US used are now used by everyone. Yelp has pages now for ethnic cuisine by neighborhood and landmark. And so does the company selling cars and the company selling online education and the company selling whatever it is you think you want to sell.

Now you might be able to come up with some trick that no one has thought of yet (what UrbanSpoon did when Yelp wasn’t looking), and some of you might actually pull it off. But I sure wouldn’t bet on it. When UrbanSpoon was doing this SEO was a fringe skill practices by hackers. Now every company knows it’s fundamental to their business and they either have a crack corporate team in-house or they are utilizing a specialized consulting firm. Most company’s still aren’t very good at it – but it only takes ten of them to be better than you and you won’t be listed.

In fact even if you are better than all of the established companies, they will still have two things going for them:

1. They have history and you don’t. Google values history
2. They have a brand and you don’t. And Google is caring more and more about the strength of your brand (which I will talk about in the book when I get to SEO)

Basically you are outgunned.

#3 Word of Mouth

“Ed. My product is awesome. People will use it and then tell all their friends who will use it and tell all their friends.”

Again, this is possible. But unlikely. Even great music goes undiscovered. Read Duncan Watts’ Everything is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer) and get back to me. It’s really really hard to go viral. The only time I would give a product a real chance of this happening is if use of the product forces it to be virally spread (like early days of Farmville or the Executive Hoodie of BetaBrands). Even then I give it even odds you won’t make the leap. But if it’s fully built into the product (and not a social sharing button you hope people press at the end of the experience) then it might be worth taking a stab at it. And if you do, make sure you have a way to keep customers coming back after they shop/use once. How many of us checked off how many of “100 things to see before you die” and shared it with friends on facebook and have never checked out that company again (they tried. They have dozens of other “100 lists” you can work your way through, from foods to movies to beaches. But it was played out before they even really got started).

So if Internet Companies are not the right choice, what is?

Offline companies.

I’m not saying you should open a Subway Franchise (or even worse: a Subway competitor!). I am saying you should build an offline, real-world-product. And as you create your product keep the online portion of the experience front and center. I’m really saying there are three types of companies: Online companies, Offline companies and this new thing: “Offline companies with online optimized experiences”. While OCWOOE might be catchy for some people, I am going to call them Offline/Online companies, or Off-On-Cos).

When you look at most of the really successful online companies these days, they are actually OffOnCos. Fundamentally they are Offline companies that have been built from the ground up to incorporate online and/or mobile utilization.

What is Uber? It’s just a black car or taxi service. But they have a great ap that feeds you real time data that makes the entire experience better. If Uber was a tool to book taxies that they tried to monetize “later” they would be in a mess. Instead they have their own inventory fleet. They are an offline business that could have existed 100 years ago, but with a much better internet-enabled customer experience.

Have you used Postmates? They are a bike courier delivery service I live by. The only thing online about them is their app that I can use to book a courier (who also has a app on his phone to get my message and know what to deliver). Everything is charged automagically through my credit card. The experience is seemless (most of the time), but the company could have existed 100 years ago (and likely did).

I run marketing for A Place For Mom. We have 300+ local advisors across the country helping families make the transition for senior housing. We could have existed 50 years ago. Back then we would have done our marketing through magazines and television advertising. Today we still use TV and magazines, but the vast majority of our families come through optimizing our online marketing and website. We are an offline company with great online marketing.

A friend of mine created Raveable.com – a pure-play online company that aggregated and summarized online reviews. For his next company he is staying far away from being an Internet Company. Instead he is building a craft beer delivery service. Delivering craft beer not available in grocery stores could have been done (wait for it) 100 years ago. The only difference is he’s doing it with online-first in mind.

Tough Mudder is my last example. It’s not an online company at all. It obviously could have existed any time in the past. But they were able to leverage the power of social media and our desire to share how ‘tough’ we are on facebook to spread his message virally. The internet gave him marketing opportunities that didn’t exist before, but his product certainly could have.

When you are looking for your next big idea, take a step back and think about how you will market it and how you will deal with the extremely low barriers to entry we see in the online space these days. Then go back and look at an entrepreneurship or product development handbook from twenty years ago. Think about how you could create a real-world product to solve a problem or create an experience. Then spend some time to consider how that idea would work in an internet age.

Online-only companies were the low-hanging fruit of the internet age. But thankfully the tree has a lot of fruit, we just need to climb a little higher now. The next branches are all about solving real world problems thinking about the online experience first.

Disagree? Comment below!

I know you are all patiently waiting for the next chapter (on Attribution). It is coming along nicely. It has expanded so much that it will actually be split in two: Attribution is Hard and Attribution is Easy. Stay tuned.

In the meantime I wanted to share my new experiment with Twitter.

In general for a business I don’t believe Twitter is a great place to sell your product. But it has a lot of value in creating social signals which drive SEO results (which I will go over in my Social Media Chapter). And it also has great uses beyond sales.

Twitter is an incredible tool for communicating with people who otherwise would never spend the time to talk to you. I can’t pick up the phone and call Tom Peters. If I sent him an email it would very likely be ignored or handled by an assistant. But I can sent him a Twitter message and more often than not he will write back (and if it’s interesting enough reply publicly to his following). Lady Gaga isn’t going to chat with you, but your favorite author may only have 100 followers and jump at the chance to interact.

Apart from the interaction, Twitter, to me, is a great media discovery tool. When I started on Twitter I only followed media outlets. My Twitter feed was just a list of headlines I could click through to. Apart from maybe Reddit, it’s the best tool I’ve found.

Over time I’ve added personalities and some friends to my Twitter feed. I tend to follow other people who post links to interesting content. Effectively just expanding the diversity of the headlines. It was a great model, and I recommend it for anyone who is looking for a media-discovery solution.

The issue is that the model doesn’t help me build my following. With the launch of this blog I am putting out content – but I get more traffic to this site from my facebook friends than I do my tiny Twitter following.

So I am changing my tactics from being optimized for content discovery to optimizing for follower growth. And the strategy I am going to use is copied from  Jeff Faria. Jeff is an author who’s first book is ‘coming soon’. Without being any sort of celebrity he managed to build a following of almost 100,000 people.

Here is how he did it:

1. Find/create lists of people to follow who you would like to follow you
2. Follow as many of those people as you can every day (within Twitter’s limits)
3. Wait a week or so. Unfollow the people that don’t follow you back
4. If someone follows you un-prompted, send them a direct message with content you would like shared, and then scan their recent tweets and re-tweet something that you think would be valuable for them. If they re-tweet your content then follow them. If they don’t then don’t follow them

That’s it.

The tool he used was manageflitter.com.

The challenge in all of this is two-fold:

1. You have to follow and unfollow a lot of people – and you have to do it manually. Thankfully for $12/month ManageFilter makes it a lot easier
2. Twitter has all sorts of rules to prevent spammers, and this strategy can trigger those rules if you aren’t careful

Due to Twitter rules when you have a small following you can only add about 200 or so new ‘follows’ per day. And unless you have more than 2000 followers yourself, you can’t follow more than 2000 people. Which means that after ten days you have to start cleaning out your followers (i.e., unfollow people who haven’t followed you) before you can start trying to build again.

So here is my plan starting today – February 18th, 2014.

I will start following 200 or so people a day who are interested in Marketing or Marathons (two pick two of my interests). Once I get to 2000 people I am following I will start unfollowing the earliest 200 accounts that are not following me, and I will add 200 more new accounts. I will keep repeating this process.

If you were recently followed by me (and found your way to this post), now you know why. Hopefully you will follow back.

I will come back to this post every week or so with my results.

February 18th (morning): Followers (167), Following (260)

February 18th (evening): Followers (189), Following (560)

UPDATES:

I tried to continue the plan I started on the 18th following 400 or so people a day. I was immediately warned by the software that I was following too many people in a seven-day period and that I was likely to set-off Twitters spam filters. They gave me that warning even if I only followed 10 people in a specific day. So I wasn’t able to follow many more people for a week after my ‘splurge’. So latest numbers:

February 25th (evening): Followers: (226), Following (585)

So net effect was I followed an additional 315 people and picked up an additional 59 followers – or about 19% follow-back rate.

On March 3rd I found a way to export all of my LinkedIn contacts into a CSV file and upload the CSV file to Gmail. Then I linked my Twitter account with Gmail and followed any LinkIn contact that had a profile picture and at least one tweet (about 250 people of my 1000+ LI contacts). On the recommendation of ManageFlitter I’ve pulled back on my daily follows to 50 folks, but doing it every day (rather than 100/day for 3-4 days/week).

My new totals:

March 6th (mid-day): Followers: (343), Following (1,305)

That’s 117 new followers with 675 new follows (not counting this morning) -> 17.3% follow-back rate

The difference between 19% and 17% is likely noise. But at the same time I have implemented BufferApp to create a stead (~4-5/day) of quality tweets (which is driving un-initiated followers). It could be that the reduced follow-back ratio is driven by the disproportionate Follower:Following ratio I now have (3.8:1). It will be interesting to continue to monitor that follow-back rate and see how it trends as my F:F ratio changes.

The experiment continues. I will continue to follow ~50 folks a day for the next 2 weeks. At that point I should have numbers that look something like Following (2000), Followers (450). When I hit that point I will start unfollowing people at the same rate as I follow new folks until I get my follower count up to 2000.

Next update in a week.

Stay tuned!

If you are reading this and haven’t followed me yet, now would be a great time: @ednever

Have any other tips for growing your Twitter base? Please comment below.

If you want to hire a top naming consultant you will have to pay upwards of $50,000. And that doesn’t include your logo. Or you can read through the vast ideas people are willing to share on the internet around the different emotions different vowel sounds will cause in your customers or how a bastardized Latin version of your product category could make a good brand name (there is even a site that looks at start-up success based on the first letter of their name. Correlation not equal to causation…). There is very little evidence on the effectiveness of any of this. Your personal opinion is as good as any consultants in this case. But there are five rules you should follow when creating a name (in order of importance):

1-      Be Unique. If someone only half-remembers your name, you want them to remember you and not your competitor. There is nothing worse than spending a lot of money or putting forth a lot of effort and not getting the credit. It is very very hard to break through the noise of the market, so whenever you do, when even a tiny breakthrough happens, you want to make sure people are remembering your brand and not someone else’s. This is a rule that is broken all the time by people who do not know better. Consider the senior housing referral space. These are all different companies: SeniorHomes.com, SeniorHousing.net, SeniorHousingNet.com, SeniorLiving.com, SeniorLiving.net, SeniorLivingNet.com, SeniorsForLiving.com. It’s enough to make your mind spin. If one of these companies were to create a TV advertisement what do you think the chances are that after seeing the spot, one of those viewers might find one of their competitors instead. Don’t fall into this trap.

2-      Be Descriptive. Do you have an enormous marketing budget? If so this step may not matter. But if you don’t, you want to make sure your brand name is somewhat descriptive. People who hear about your company or product may ONLY hear the brand name. Ideally that name itself will give them a good idea what you do or offer. It will also help them remember you more later, since it is easier to tie your name and the offering together in their mind.

When I was launching the award-point loyalty program for Expedia we hired naming consultants. Their top suggested name was “Expedia funcierge” [pronounced: fun-see-air-shu]. It was supposed to be a play on combining the words “fun” and “concierge”. Instead it read like “fungus” and had pretty unclear pronunciation. It may have worked if we were going to spend tens of millions of dollars promoting the program, but we weren’t (even then I would be doubtful). We wanted the program to be self-explanatory. We rejected their idea and chose the far less creative, but far more effective: “Expedia Rewards”

3-      Own the .com. Can you own YourName.com? You really want to. Yes, you could always pick up YourName.net or .us or YourNameOnline.com or YourNameYourIndustry.com or something equally creative, but no matter what you do you, if you are at all successful, you will be sending a significant percentage of your traffic to YourName.com. If you aren’t the owner of that domain you have given someone else a nice gift. When I started this site I could have picked up MarketingIsEasy.net for $7.99. Instead I paid $1000 for MarketingIsEasy.com. I’m convinced it is worth it. In some ways this is just a sub-rule of Rule #1 – don’t get confused with someone else.

Another hint: If you are thinking about starting a brand, pick up the website name BEFORE you let anyone know you want to start that brand. It makes negotiation a lot easier. When, in my work with A Place For Mom, we wanted to start a senior housing reviews site, I approached the owner of SeniorAdvisor.com as an individual to negotiate pricing. If he knew there was a big company behind the purchase we would likely have had to pay a lot more.

4-      Make it spellable and pronounceable. Now we are moving into the “nice to have” category. Say your name out-loud to a friend. Now have your friend try and spell it. If she can’t then consider other options. This rule is broken all the time by the new generation of tech start-ups: fiverr, flickr, tindr, etc. (why do they all end in r’s?). It’s a function of not being able to follow Rule #3 if they stuck with the names they likely really wanted. So if you have a choice between a mis-spelled name like this with the .com or something like FiverServices.com, break rule #4, not Rule #3

5-      Length. The shorter your name the better for many reasons.

That’s it. Those are my five rules.

Often you will be forced to break a rule. When that happens, consider these rules in order of importance. Only break Rule #1 is you are prepared to spend so much you become a huge household name and over-power anything you could ever be confused with. Actually, even then, if you are starting from scratch, don’t put yourself in that position.

You will find that the most common conflict is between Rule #1 and Rule #2. All of the bad examples I gave in #1 are very descriptive and easily meet the requirements for #2. In every case Rule #1 trumps Rule #2. You can overcome the issues with #2, but if you are advertising and people don’t know it is YOU when they see a media impression, you are just throwing away money. Unique >> Descriptive, even if ideally you have both.

Disagree? Have a rule I missed? Comment below.

I have not completed my next ‘book’ chapter this week, so instead I will share this book review (of sorts).

People looking to get into marketing often ask me what books they should read. Unfortunately there are not many I can recommend. Most marketing books seem to actually be books on how to be creative or sometimes just that you should be creative. Thanks.) Creative marketing skills were likely important 30 years ago, but today’s best marketers are closer to 70/30 technical/creative – and that technical side of marketing gets very short shelf space in the bookstore.

I am regularly disappointed when I start on a new marketing book. The best that can be said is that many of them have interesting case studies. In a twitter conversation I had with Tom Peter’s recently he told me that he only reads the case studies of the books he buys and skips all the rest completely. I actually like synthesis and conclusions from my business books. Unfortunately I rarely get what I hope for. This lack of concrete marketing synthesis is a big reason why I’ve decided to start this ‘live writing’ process – to fill the gap with a marketing book that covers what someone really needs to know in the function.

The marketing books that have influenced me the most were generally not marketing books at all: books like Duncan Watt’s Everything is Obvious (Once you know the answer), or Tyler Cowen’s The Average is Over.  Both of those books (and others) will eventually get write-ups here – likely in weeks when I can’t get my act together to write a book chapter.

When it comes to core marketing books – books where the author knew she was talking about marketing when she wrote it – there is one that, for me, stands far above the rest. I have bought this book for my entire marketing team. I recommend it to non-marketer executives who want to get grounding on what’s really important in marketing. And I definitely recommend it any time I talk to a fellow marketer.

For all of my promotion of the book, it’s still not very well known (this may be a hint that having me promote your book is not going to help very much). As of today it’s ranked as the 82,563th bestselling book on Amazon. There doesn’t seem to be a rating on where it ranks on their marketing book list, but the 100^th bestselling marketing book is ranked 10,350^th overall and the 99^th is 10,266^th, so we might be able to extrapolate that it’s something like the 860^th bestselling marketing book. Basically: It’s not driving the conversation about marketing today. And it should be.

The book is called How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp.

My argument that marketing is like medicine in the 19^th century is stolen directly from Mr. Sharp – as are a lot of my beliefs about marketing. He makes some compelling arguments.

First: If you are at all involved in marketing and you haven’t read this book already, you should put an order in at Amazon now. I even provided a link (it’s not even an affiliate link, so I’m not getting paid for this)

Second: Let me try and summarize a few of his concepts from the book, and briefly where I disagree with him.

How Brands Grow

Mr. Sharp spends most of his book destroying the generally accepted beliefs of most marketers with data. Some of the concepts he attacks:

• Most of your sales will come from a small group of loyal customers: Not true. He uses sales data to show that repeat purchases are directly correlated to share. There is no such thing as a small brand with loyal buyers. It just doesn’t exist. You need to focus on growing your overall share and getting more customers, rather than trying to increase loyalty with your existing customers and by doing so will actually increase loyalty as a side-effect.
• You need to have a differentiated product targeted at a specific customer segment: Not true. Segmentation itself is a fairly artificial exercise (interesting math, and great for storytelling, but not great at actually selling products).  It turns out that being appealing to a lot of people is almost always better than trying to specialize in a niche.
• Loyalty Programs do not increase loyalty – even a little bit, and definitely cost more money than they could ever drive in increased revenue
• Brand marketing does not affect your best customers. It increases the frequency of purchase for your occasional customers a very small amount. This means that people always say they are not affected by marketing: “I maybe drink Coke once every 8 months – the ads don’t affect me.” He argues that that ‘unaffected drinker’ would have drunk Coke every 8.1 months without the ads. It’s a subtle effect that is very hard to measure, but has a huge effect over the long term (without anyone knowing they were consciously affected).

There is more, but I won’t spoil all the surprises as you read it (have I mentioned yet you should be buying and reading this book already?). He backs everything up with some pretty compelling data that you  won’t see in the received wisdom spouted by most marketing texts.

Where I disagree

Mr. Sharp is an academic who, as far as I know, has not spent time trying to make companies work. His data is very compelling, but it is also generalized. The risk of that generalization is that, in order to make a conclusion, treats all companies and situations the same. This is a mistake. I will dive into one specific example.

Mr. Sharp believes that Loyalty Programs destroy value. I believe that MOST Loyalty Programs destroy value. I even believe that on average Loyalty Program destroy value. If you were to ask me to guess which of two retailers performed better last year and all I knew about the two retailers was that one had a loyalty program and one did not, I would guess the program-less retailer every time. But I also believe that it is possible to create loyalty programs that create value. I even believe there are many (or at least some) loyalty programs out there right now that create value for their companies.

Mr. Sharp shows some very compelling data on specific loyalty programs that are destroying value. But just because I show you a bunch of white swans, it doesn’t mean that black swans cannot exist (with credit to Nassim Taleb). I will go into a significant amount of detail on loyalty programs in a month or two that will hopefully prove this to you.

My second criticism of the book is that while it spends a lot of time tearing down the false-tower of 20^th century marketing, it does not spend a great deal of time re-building something to replace it. You are left at the end of the book thinking most of marketing is a waste of time, but unclear how to best spend your time in a new (effective) way.

The good news is you can at least stop wasting your time.

Hopefully over the next few months I can start walking you through how to best spend all the time you have saved. But before I can do that there is an awful lot you need to stop doing. Read Byron Sharp’s fantastic (and under-rated) book and you will know more about what is true in marketing that 90% of the professionals out there right now.

Big Data is the latest business term to explode. Every consultant or guru will tell you your company needs to be focusing on it.

McKinsey says it “will become the key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity.”

Amazon’s top selling Big Data book says it is a revolution that will change the way we live work and think.

IBM claims to have the right platform that keeps your needs in mind (wouldn’t your company want its own Watson?)

SAS goes further hen everyone and claims we are past the growth wave of Big Data and now “Big Data is the reality of doing business.”

If there is any argument against these beliefs it’s that Big Data has a downside of invading privacy. There has been a lot less questioning of Big Data as a solution to a problem that doesn’t need to be solved – at least doesn’t need to be solved yet for most companies.

What all four of those examples really have in common is that they are trying to (1) Sound like they are on the cutting edge, and (2) Trying to sell you something.

If you are thinking you need to go down the route of mastering your Big Data, please read my latest chapter first: Why your company should not use Big Data

If you are concerned that your company doesn’t have Big Data and you might get left behind, stop worrying. I try to spell out in the chapter what you should actually be worried about (Hint: It’s Easy).

As always, please come back to this post with your comments and arguments on why I’m completely wrong on this one.

I have just published the second write-up of “the book”: Why every product is either a Tylenol or a Vitamin – and why it’s important for you to know what your product is. Take a look and let me know what you think.

I have turned off Comments on the “Book” Pages, but I’m not convinced that is the right choice. For now, I will have a blog post for every section of the book (sometimes more than one), and you can make comments on that section on the blog. But it seems like a clunky solution.

Please comment below on either the choice of not having comments on the book, or specific comments on the Tylenol vs Vitamin theory.

I’m especially interested if there is something you disagree with on the T-vs-V theory or it’s execution.

The biggest value for me in writing this book “live” is the ability to have a discussion about it. I want to learn from my readers to understand what is resonating and what is not. One of you asked me if I plan on editing the “book” pages after they are published. The answer is “Yes, absolutely.” I expect those pages to change and evolve dramatically over time – which is the key reason why I don’t have comments on those pages. They could potentially begin referring to content that no longer exists. I would imagine I may even eliminate a page completely and incorporate that content into other pages. Sharp readers may have already noticed that the Table of Contents is different than it was last week. Contrast that with this blog where I plan on following the traditional convention on leaving everything written here without changes (or if I make changes to call them out specifically at the end of the post – fixing spelling errors for example).

Thank you again for taking the time to read. So far I am 1-for-1 on publishing new content weekly. Your readership is what will motivate me to keep up the pace.

Before I started building this site I originally planned on writing a book on marketing.

Back in the 90s I was a bit of a local expert in improv comedy – specifically how to coach improv comedy to high school students. A friend and I travelled across Southern Ontario teaching teachers how to teach improv. One day we looked at each other and said, “We keep telling people the same things. Maybe we should just write it down so we can give them a book and save our vocal cords.”

We did.

We spent a summer putting all of our techniques into a word document that we printed off on 8½”x11” paper and bound at a local Kinkos. We sold the spiral notebooks for $20 a piece (on about a $12 printing cost) when we did our tours. A few years later I submitted the “book” to two professional publishing companies that had histories of publishing improv books. One decided to publish our book professionally. The only change they required was the title. We had called it “Why Practice?”, after a question we were always asked, “If it’s improvised, why do you need to practice?”. They thought the name was too un-obvious and had us change the title to “The Ultimate Improv Book”, which likely doubled (or more) the eventual sales on Amazon.

Now I’m in the same boat again. I likely have a call every other week with a CMO who is having trouble with search engine marketing or with a VC who is looking to invest in a loyalty-based company. I end up telling the same story over and over again. It was the same pattern as 1997 only with a new topic. So I’m going back to the same solution, only this time with new technology.

I’ve laid out a structure of content I’d like to share, in a relatively specific order: Call that the “Book”. I will try to stay on task and create one section of the book every week or two working through the structure (that may end up changing as I go along). I would love your feedback on the book as it progresses.

In addition I will have other thoughts on Marketing to share that don’t fit into the book structure. Those thoughts and ideas I will share on the traditional “newest post first” blog format. I will also post a short blog post whenever I update the book section.

And maybe after this entire thing gets written I will submit it to a professional publisher just like I did with “Why Practice?” a decade ago. Hopefully I’ve learned enough about brands in the last ten years that they will let me keep the name “Marketing is Easy”.

Where should you go from here?

(1)    Start reading the book at the beginning here

(2)    Work your way through the random blog posts here

(3)    I will post on twitter whenever I have an update on the blog. Follow me on twitter: @ednever. And on facebook: facebook.com/marketingiseasybook

(4)    If you want to learn a little more about me, check out the About section

(5)    If you are into off-the-beaten-path travel, check out my travel site: stopovertravel.com or its facebook page: facebook.com/travel

(6)    Please comment on the posts as you read them. I don’t expect to have a lot of readers initially but it will be very easy to start a discussion with me at least. My only motivation for doing this is to share these ideas with the world, so it will always be nice to know someone is hearing it, even if – especially if – they disagree.