Posted in Marketing Your Freelance Consultancy at 9:06 am by andy

I had a professor who told this story:

Let’s say you’re a beer manufacturer and you make pretty good beer and sell it 12-pack cases that sit in your grocer’s refigerated beer section. 12-packs are packaged using something called “coated paperboard” which is thicker than paper, but not as thick as cardboard.

Let’s say you pay someone a lot of money to design the picture you put on the outside of the coated paperboard as well as on each can. You have pretty good beer, a really enticing design on the carton, everything’s great!

Now coated paperboard is basically thick paper. It absorbs water (albeit slower than regular paper). Now when your beer comes out of manufacturing/processing, it’s chilled. The cold beer cartons are then stacked out on the loading dock while the truck is loaded, then the truck is cold as it transports the beer to the store. The beer is unloaded at the store’s loading dock or on the sidewalk in front, and then moved to the store’s refrigerated section to be sold. Then the beer is picked up by the consumer, purchased, put into the trunk of their car, driven home, and then put into the refrigerator. Still with me?

Ok, what happens when the beer is left on the loading dock, sidewalk, or in your trunk? In most places in the world, condensation forms on the chilled beer cans inside the paperboard. Every time the inside of the coated paperboard gets a little wet, it gets a little weaker. If you didn’t choose the right thickness and coating properties of the coated paperboard, the 12-pack will break and spill the consumer’s beer cans all over the sidewalk, floor of the store, wherever it decides to break.

Moral of the story: the pretty logo is enticing, but it can be totally screwed up by other marketing messages you really didn’t think about.

And that’s why most people fail at “marketing”. They think it’s just the visible pretty pictures that are important when sometimes it’s the little things like how you answer the phone that can totally screw your desired marketing.

Real marketing is thinking about every contact you have with potential/existing clients, even those potential clients you never see and those “contacts” you didn’t intend.