If you were a gourmet chef who was starting a new restaurant, then you would want your prospective patrons to be epicure, foodies, or connoisseurs of fine dining. So, if someone came to you with a proposal to help you advertise cheap hamburgers to your community, then you would laugh at them. Now, you are quite capable of making a Big Mac; in fact, you could probably come up with a pretty good one that people would really enjoy. However, your skills, your restaurant, and your entire purpose for being in business are not to mass produce hamburgers for the masses. You trained and dreamed of selling high-quality food to those who can appreciate it. So if you wanted or needed a plan to advertise your new eating establishment – who would you listen to?
The answer is quite clear: you would listen to those who understood how to advertise and market to epicures. You would not be looking at companies that specialize in coupon sales in the back of community magazines. You would tell the difference right away, right? The salesperson from one ad agency would be asking you questions regarding your price, your offer, your hours, and your budget for ad placement in local ad sources. The other would be asking you about your desired clientele; they would be considering how to reach them, where they shop, what places they frequent, and how they might hear about a new restaurant in town. One would want to place ads on windshields in a mall parking lot, and the other would want to send a personalized invitation in a fancy envelope to a select group of important people in the community. You would know the difference immediately.
If this contrast is so easy to detect, then why is it that businesses are constantly hiring advertising and marketing firms that are really good at selling the B2B equivalent of Big Macs? I think we would have to dive into the psychology of the business owner, founder, and sales leader. They all have the same requirements, and they need to grow faster. They all have the same constraints of limited budget and people. So, I think what is happening is that the idea of finding a mass market appeal to draw in the ideal client is too tempting to pass up. All the appeals and claims of mass marketing appeal to them because they all promise rapid sales, rapid growth, an increase in leads, and all the things they want to hear. The challenge is that these are all true, especially for those selling hamburgers, or better yet, hamburgers as a service (HaaS). The reality is that a gourmet chef would never be interested in a mass market appeal to sell HaaS, and the same goes for anyone with the same type of service or products that target a specific buyer who has a definite sophistication in their requirements.
This is difficult to cypher, unfortunately. The reason is there are hundreds of thousands of mass market agencies, services, and methodologies vying for attention constantly. The firms that focus on the specialized buyer really do not bother with advertising their approach and methodology because only the valiant will ever find them – and that is what they want. See, this is a mentality that is hard to understand until you see it work. The specialized market consultant for high-end restaurants does not need to advertise, nor would they want to. They know that there are only going to be a handful of legitimate buyers in their market at a given time. If they spend all of their time focused on filtering and qualifying opportunities from mass market appeal, they will not be able to focus their time on the only buyers who need their services. If a gourmet chef moves into a local area after graduating from a prestigious school, guess who is knocking at their door or meeting them at an exclusive function? That is right, the restaurant consultant. This is where they spend their time, talking to, meeting, and helping the potential restaurant owner. They would never dream of a spray-and-pray modality of advertising their customized and purpose-built marketing services.
What I find interesting is that the firms that advertise in a mass-market fashion are usually suited for companies that need to advertise in a mass-market fashion. The same is true in reverse. The firms that target individuals with particular needs tend to work with clients who need to do the same. So, if you are looking at hiring a firm that found you with a mass marketing method, this should be your first clue as to the appropriate fit. I guarantee they will be recommending a mass market approach to you. They will be quite literally asking you to advertise Big Macs to Epicures.
