John Linton Two phone calls yesterday gave me pause for thought which I duly did over the remainder of the day and again over the first waking hours of this morning. They were both related to promoting Exetel's services via 'dual marketing' with other companies. Exetel has never had such approaches before and to get two within a few hours was an odd co-incidence. I suppose our TV advertising in various regional areas has, as usual, drawn the attention of non-intended 'viewers' and maybe makes us look as though we are a spender of money on these sorts of exercises. That's certainly true in one case as they specifically mentioned how much they 'admired' our short ad. The other one was similar in that it referenced our web site's content that deals with our small contributions to fauna and flora protection.
Since our beginnings in January 2004, Exetel has done no promotion, advertising or marketing and until February of this year has had no 'sales force'. Since that time we have been adding sales trainees at a rate of around 2 per month, have agreed a regional country television advertising program and have designed and distributed an increasing number of 'posters' and brochures' - we even sent someone on a brief 'promotional trip' to Central Victoria! All this from a company that for five years had strictly adhered to its base m.o. of only using a web site to 'sell' its products and services. We have even been discussing with more than one of our suppliers how we could be involved in 'joint promotion' of some of the services we buy from them. FCS pretty soon we will be hiring a "Marketing Manager" if this trend continues!
Perhaps it's just a phase we had to go through or just an indication of how tired my mind has become to allow my total aversion to all advertising and promotion to be overcome by the steadily increasing 'pressures' exerted by people in and outside the company to involve ourselves in these, to me, always pointless and money wasting processes (not the hiring of sales people which is the one essential change we had to make to Exetel to accomplish a move to a much higher percentage of revenue from non-residential services).
It seems to me that, in a very short time, we have moved from our previous position of "no marketing/advertising/promotion whatsoever" to doing all of those things simultaneously. I fully realise that I agreed with each of these initiatives and am neither ascribing 'blame' nor distancing myself from the decisions to do any of these processes - I'm just expressing a belated surprise at how much time and money we are now committing to things that I have regarded so negatively for the whole of my business life. No fool like an old fool springs to mind. It's not that I don't agree with all of the various things in terms of promotion/marketing individually, we are doing it's just that I really don't see an overall benefit to Exetel's long term's objectives. If we are to spend money 'selling' our services then I think I am not the right person to direct those activities....it goes against the very essence of the reasons I was involved in setting up Exetel in the first place and means, to me at least, that there is no real reason for Exetel to exist.
Any way, getting back to the joint promotion 'opportunities' we were offered yesterday. Having mulled them over for some hours I have come to the conclusion that Exetel would have to give away too much of our 'intellectual property' in terms of our knowledge of how to approach the target marketplaces involved and while we are very much a 'no secrets/open book' company it did force me to realise that we do a number of things better than any of our competitors and we would be foolish to spell out those few 'secret' advantages that we do have. That could be pure self delusion/foolish pride but it seems to be true in a number of ways and as one of our suppliers remarked recently "you guys sell far more of 'product X' than our really biggest wholesale customers like Macquarie Telecom" - so we must have some 'hidden advantages/capabilities'....perhaps just our very low prices?
Then again perhaps it is just our being foolish and our false self aggrandisement? Quite possibly - but I think we have 'opened the kimono' (to go back to marketing speak of the 1970s) quite far enough in terms of making our knowledge and research available as widely as we have already done - filling in the few remaining blanks for our few real competitors would not be in our interests. So I emailed the two enquirers from yesterday a few minutes ago and thanked them for their interest but said we had "too much on our plate" to consider anything else for the rest of 2009 which apart from being totally true is probably an understatement. In fact it wasn't until I reached this precise moment in summarising the issues we are currently dealing with vis a vis "promotional activities" that I realised how very over committed we actually are in terms of time, personnel and money to doing things we have absolutely no knowledge or experience of.
I wish it were possible to go back to our web site only marketing approach - it took a lot less time, cost a lot less money and worked quite well.