DMN3 Blog

What can you learn about marketing from a fairytale written in 1865? It would seem a lot! Don’t believe me? Read on….

Alice in Wonderland was written by Lewis Carroll almost 150 years ago. The story of the little girl named Alice who fell down the rabbit hole has become a literature classic. The movie “Alice in Wonderland” was made by Disney in 1952. In 2010, we saw the Hollywood remake with the latest computer-generated animation and 3-D effects.

The book contains many quotations that are relevant to both marketing and to life in general. In this post and those to follow I will explain my view of what some of the quotes mean for those of us involved in marketing.

Alice: Good advice. If I listened earlier, I wouldn't be here. But that's just the trouble with me. I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.

Sound familiar? Do you follow your own advice? Much of what you will learn here are  things you should already know but may seldom follow in the pressure of daily deadlines.

Successful marketing means doing things that we know to be right despite the pressures imposed to get the project out the door.

The Red Queen: “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Marketing needs to be on-going. Reduced marketing efforts will be followed by reduced sales. This cause and effect is not always understood in board rooms as marketing budgets are cut during economic downturns. Remember that marketing is also “relative.” You do not market into a vacuum. Your marketing message is competing at two levels.

1. Consumers are bombarded with brand impressions daily. How can your message stand out among the thousands of other brands to which consumers are exposed?
2. You are competing with other organizations that also have products and services that address the same consumer needs as yours in the same markets you serve.

Research shows that the frequency and consistency of a brand’s marketing message impressions are an important part of gaining and maintaining market share vis-à-vis your competition.

There is no such thing as running in place. If you are not gaining speed, then you will lose ground to your competitors. You must out market your competitors if you are to gain sales relative to them, i.e. increase your market share.

Alice: Better read it first, for if one drinks much from a bottle marked "Poison", it's almost certain to disagree with one sooner or later.

So often the response to a marketing campaign that isn’t working is to do more of it. Often it is the result of not having an evaluation scheme in place to assess the relative success on the specific strategies you employ. There is a saying in marketing: “Half of my marketing budget is being wasted. I just don’t know which half!” Whether you are using bad marketing strategies or doing good things badly, you must have a plan to "read" the results and reassess your marketing strategies.

To continue to use marketing strategies that are not working is almost certain to disagree with your bottom line sooner or later.

Alice and her Wonderland friends are telling you that marketing is very important to an organization’s success. They are also telling us that you must do it right and not just do a lot of it. I’ve seen marketing professionals who should know better take short cuts to designing a marketing plan and campaign…often for budget or deadline reasons. They know better. They just don’t follow their own advice.

So what is the best approach to a marketing plan or campaign? Let’s see what Alice and her friends have to say about developing and implementing a marketing plan. Stay tuned….