We attended the Marketing Conference San Francisco at the Embarcadero on July 20th, 2015, to get a quick overview of what to expect in the future of marketing. There is a lot of hype around what is happening in the world of marketing, but I think we can learn a lot from the industry and what they are doing to bring in more money to the bottom line (not necessarily a bad thing) and attract more people to the industry.
In marketing, as with any other industry, you have to start somewhere and that’s the one thing that really stands out for me in Marketing Conference San Francisco. There is so much talk about what companies will do. But what really really stood out for me was how much of the conference I learned from one of the keynote speakers. It was, in my opinion, one of the best marketing talks I’ve ever heard.
Ive always liked marketing and I think it is a cool industry. I have a lot of respect for the people involved and their efforts to make the world a better place. But Ive never been a fan of the constant focus on what companies will do. I think that is a huge part of what is holding back progress in the industry. We need to stop telling companies what they need to do and start telling them what they want to do.
Ive said it before over and over and it is a really good point. If you are a company that is a bit stuck in your ways, what you do is what you do. Be it a small company that is trying to move into a new location, or a large corporation that is trying to get to a new market, I dont know that it is productive for you to be constantly trying to figure out how you can move.
The problem is that sometimes companies don’t know where they are going, and they are so invested in trying to figure it out that they end up in the same place over and over again. For example, I’m currently working with a new client in the US. They are a large company that has a lot of employees and a lot of revenue. A few years ago they decided to go public. They did this by getting into a new industry.
That was a bad idea. In fact I was shocked by what I found out when I looked at their financials. They have lots of employees, and are earning lots of money. They are also making tons of money. But they are also losing money.
In the real world, companies do all sorts of things to make themselves look more attractive. For example, many large corporations have a “promotions” department that manages the activities of employees. They decide what activities they can do for employees and what they can’t. For instance, they might decide not to send out Christmas cards. They might also not give out anniversary cards for a year.
And the same goes for promotional events. You don’t want to make a promotion that you are going to lose. We recently had a few events where we lost money. We didn’t even win anything. And we did a lot of things wrong. We didn’t advertise. We did too many things that were really terrible. We did a lot of things for free. I’m sure if we had just made some money, we could have done it all right.
I’ve been in marketing for a long time and I feel as though I’ve been there for the majority of the last decade. I hate to think about the days where I was just sitting around drinking beer.
The only thing we’ve done is just make a profit, but Ive never had any good profit. The reason for that is because we’ve been in business for the past 20 years. We don’t have any more of a profit here. But we did a lot of things that we would really have to do. We did some of the things that we would really have to do now to keep the money flowing, but we lost a lot of money.
