Marketing Consulting FAQs                                              

• Should I hire MW Strategic Marketing to implement this into my business or should I do it myself?
  
  To know if you need marketing consulting advice for sure, you first need to determine your "marketing risk," which simply means how much is at stake when you run a marketing campaign. If you spend $250,000 to produce and run a television commercial, you'd better get it right or you're going to waste a lot of money. That would be a high marketing risk. On the other hand, if your company is small and you send out a coupon in the Valpak every other month, of course you'd love for it to get stellar results, but the dollars involved are small enough that we consider that a small marketing risk. We typically work with clients that have a higher marketing risk on a one-on-one basis, and smaller clients with smaller marketing risks generally participate in one of MasterMind Marketing or other similar programs. If your company has any marketing risk at all, if your spending any money on marketing and advertising, whether that's a $1000 a month or $1,000,000 a month, your doing yourself a disservice to attempt to put this together yourself. The cost of doing it right is far lower than the cost of doing it wrong.
   
• How long does it take to for you to implement MYM in to my business?
  
  Depending on the complexity of your situation, it could take anywhere from a few weeks to several months to get the initial project in place. Maintenance of your marketing program should be ongoing.
   
• My business is unique... can this still work for me?
  
  Absolutely. Each business is unique... but at the same time, all businesses also share some common threads which make the marketing process replicable from industry to industry. Since the MYM system is based on human nature that says people always want to make the best decision when they buy something, then marketing's job is to faciliate the decision making process. In any business, our job is to discover what the important and relevant issues are (ie, hot buttons) and then use the Marketing Equation to communicate those issues to your prospects.
   
• How is MYM different from other marketing philosophies?
  
  MYM is based on simple human motivation. People intuitivley always want to make the best decision when they purchase something, and the heart of the MYM philosophy is that marketing's #1 job is to facilitate the decision making process.
   
• Should marketing be "emotional" or "logical"?
  
  Effective marketing will include BOTH. The Marketing Equation inherently handles both sides of the equation--interrupt and engage based on emotional hot buttons, and educate based on a logical case. Here's one way to think about it--Emotion gives life to the logical argument, and logic gives validity to the emotional one.
   
• Is there a place for creativity within the MYM model?
  
  Absolutely. But the process is still 90% scientific... if you can properly identify the prospect's hot buttons and create good headlines, you can get great marketing results without being particularly "creative."
   
• Why do you say that 'everything you've ever learned about marketing is wrong'?
  
  Because almost all of the exposure that people have had to marketing and advertising in the last 50 years has been showing them examples of under-leveraged marketing. In the 1950's and 60's television entered the marketing mix on a national scale and changed the way advertisers approached the marketplace. Arguments of why a prospect were replaced with more efficient jingles and slogans. Creativity became the hallmark of ad agencies. After a few decades, everybody forgot that marketing is supposed to facilitate the prospects' decsion making process--and not necessarily just entertain them.
   
• What percentage of advertisements would you say are "wrong"?
  
  First of all, don't confuse "done wrong" with "won't work." The real problem is ads that are under-leveraged... meaning they don't work as well as they could. They don't hit the right hot buttons (or any hot buttons at all) and/or they are geared toward the wrong part of the educational spectrum. That being said, nearly 100% of all advertising is done WRONG.
   
• Is the Marketing Equation really all that unique?
  
  Yes it is. Direct response marketing has had a formula for eons called "AIDA" which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. The problem with this formula is that nobody really seems to be able to teach anybody how to pull it off in real life. All the direct marketing books say "You need to get the prospect's attention," but there is no science behind how to do it. Again, they default to creativity. We explain how the brain works--alpha mode, beta mode, reticular activator, activators, and hot buttons. The MYM system shows you exactly how to drill down to those important and relevant issues and then write headlines accordingly. The key to the whole process is proper identification of the hot buttons and what we call and Educational Spectrum analysis. These elements are competely missing in other methodologies.