Marketing cannot rescue an unclear offer
Here is the sequence that produces most wasted marketing budgets, and it is not the one people expect.
An organisation knows its product well. It has been described internally for years, in language that is accurate, comfortable and unexamined. Someone is then asked to market it. That person, reasonably, starts from the internal description, because it is the only description that exists. Everything after that point is executed competently against a sentence that no buyer would have written.
The tell is that the marketing sounds like the organisation talking. A gym advertises modern equipment, experienced trainers and flexible membership. Every word is true. Every word is also a description of what the gym contains, which is a completely different object from what the member is buying. The member, in many cases, is buying a way to exercise near work without losing an evening, and the gym's location and its opening hours are therefore the offer while the equipment is a hygiene factor. That gym can improve its advertising indefinitely without improving its results, because the advertising is not where the problem lives.
Give it to someone outside the organisation and ask them who it is not for. If they cannot answer, the offer has not been stated, it has been described. An offer that excludes nobody is targeting nobody, and everything you spend on it afterwards is spent on finding out that the excluded population was the entire market.
There is a reason to be careful here rather than dramatic. The most repeated numbers about business failure do not survive checking. Ninety per cent of businesses do not fail: in United States establishment data covering half a million openings, 78.6 per cent survive the first year and 51.1 per cent survive five, and those rates have been stable across cohorts a decade apart, including recessionary ones. The eighty per cent new product failure rate has been documented as a myth in the field's own journal, with the empirical studies since 1977 supporting 40 per cent or less. What you do with that: stop opening presentations with a failure statistic, and stop treating clarity of offer as a matter of survival. It is a matter of efficiency. An unclear offer does not usually kill a business. It makes every pound of marketing work at a fraction of its capacity, indefinitely, without anybody being able to say why.
Five questions, asked in this order, on the offer you have fixed for the course. The order matters because the first two usually settle it.
What are we selling? In the buyer's terms, not the accounting system's. If the answer requires a category name you invented, you have not answered.
Who needs it? Not who could use it. Who has the problem badly enough to spend money this quarter.
What problem does it solve? Stated as the buyer would state it in a complaint, not as your product manager states it in a roadmap.
Why should they care now? What changed. Almost every purchase has a trigger, and marketing that does not know the trigger is guessing at timing as well as at audience.
Why us rather than the alternative? And the alternative is usually not a competitor. Level 0.3 is entirely about this.
"We provide innovative, customer-focused inventory management solutions for businesses of all sizes, helping our clients optimise their operations and achieve their goals."
Nobody is excluded. No problem is named. No trigger. The only fact in it is the category, and the category was already known to anyone reading.
"For pharmacies running two or more branches: know what stock you have in each branch without phoning, and stop losing sales to items that were sitting in the other shop."
A pharmacist with one branch now knows this is not for them, which is the point. The problem is stated in the words a pharmacist uses when complaining about it. The alternative it displaces, phoning the other branch, is named.
You take your offer sentence to three people outside your organisation. All three say it sounds good and they understand what you do. What have you learned?
Your marketing is professionally executed, your targeting is competent and your cost per click is below the category average, but enquiries are poor quality. Where should you look first?
Notes are kept with your account, alongside your progress and your gate claims. The lesson itself is readable without one.
This lesson has a tool
Open it and get your draft reviewed. Drag-and-drop tools need a wider screen; the review works anywhere.
