Magic Wand Marketing

One item of my recent holiday reading was Carole S Dwecks’ Mindset – The New Psychology of Success, a book which discusses how a ‘fixed mindset’, one that is based on the belief that one’s capbilities are unchanging and unchangeable prevents success but how a ‘growth mindset’ that is based on the assumption that one can always learn (and on actually doing so) will find more opportunities to achieve success.

I sometimes wonder whether the excuses that I often hear for not taking a fresh approach to marketing are based less on the excuses I’m given (no time, no money) and more on the business owner’s fixed idea of what they are capable of (can’t speak in public, can’t understand new technology, can’t plough their way through a tender document…).  Somewhere along the road of their life the desire to learn has been quashed.

These are people who have already showed some gumption in setting up their business in the first place and yet it seems that their comfort zone will only stretch so far.

I’ve come to the conclusion that a marketing mindset has to be a growth mindset.

• Marketing means understanding your customers.  Not only is our understanding of customer psychology developing all the time, customers themselves change, becoming more sophisticated buyers, changing their lifestyles, adapting to the changing world.  We need to keep learning to keep up with our customers.
• Marketing means knowing where we are in relation to our competitors and, if they have any sense, they won’t be standing still.  We need to keep learning, not to keep up but to stay ahead of our competitors.
• Marketing means understanding the commercial, technical and social environments which not only change but experience increasing rates of change.  We need to keep learning to keep on top of an ever more complex world.

So it does dismay me when business owners are reluctant to learn – and do – something new.  To trot out a truism, “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”, and that applies to marketing as much as anything else.  Except that there’s a real danger that you won’t “get what you’ve always got”; you’ll fall behind and get a whole lot less.

Without a willingness on a client’s part to do something differently, there’s a limited amount that I, as a consultant, can achieve.  I don’t, after all, call this the Magic Wand Marketing Blog because I actually own a magic wand   Perhaps I need a ‘growth mindset’ test to apply to potential clients?

Francine Pickering
Clarity Marketing Ltd., Nottingham