Supply Chain

We're All Hypocrites

May 25, 2010

Think about this one: on an average day, the average American will be bombarded with more than 3,600 marketing messages!

Let’s do the math - assuming 7 hours of sleep and 1 hour of personal hygiene time. That leaves 16 waking hours for the marketing department to get their hands on us.

3,600 messages divided by 16 hours is 225 messages per hour. Or, 3.75 per minute!! It is staggering, but true.

In our personal lives, we spend much of our time fighting off the marketing department:

• We DVR and flip between channels to avoid TV commercials.

• We go through our Inbox to weed out any Spam that may have gotten past the filter before reading the “clean” messages.

• We change the station or get satellite radio to tune out advertisements.

• We join the “Do not call list”.

• We open our mail near to the trash can to easily separate the “junk” from the real.

And here’s the rub: most of the stuff these messages are trying to sell have little or nothing to do with us!

Marketing today is more than interruption. It’s worse that noise. It’s hostile.

But in our professional lives, we look at the world very differently.

How many times in your company has the “solution” to a problem been, “If we could expand our message; contact more prospects; increase our advertising reach, somehow it would all be better.” More marketing, more social networking, more brochures and collateral materials, a bigger, better ad campaign etc. etc.

At the risk of being presumptuous, we’re hypocrites.

Our minds are on overload. Our customers, prospects, and ourselves have had enough!

There has be to a better way.

About the Author

Andrew R. Thomas Blog | Associate Professor of Marketing and International Business

Andrew R. Thomas, Ph.D., is associate professor of marketing and international business at the University of Akron; and, a member of the core faculty at the International School of Management in Paris, France.

He is a bestselling business author/editor, whose 23 books include, most recently, American Shale Energy and the Global Economy: Business and Geopolitical Implications of the Fracking Revolution, The Customer Trap: How to Avoid the Biggest Mistake in Business, Global Supply Chain Security, The Final Journey of the Saturn V, and Soft Landing: Airline Industry Strategy, Service and Safety.

His book The Distribution Trap was awarded the Berry-American Marketing Association Prize for the Best Marketing Book of 2010. Another work, Direct Marketing in Action, was a finalist for the same award in 2008.

Andrew is founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Transportation Security and a regularly featured analyst for media outlets around the world.

He has traveled to and conducted business in 120 countries on all seven continents.