Marketing Myths That Are Killing Business

"American business did not do fine during the 1980s."

"Not 17 marketing managers in America can talk intelligently about their marketing budget's return on investment."

"A short-term orientation over the long term turns out to be worthless."

"Only with clean-slate marketing can an organization avoid slipping into a rut and mindlessly repeating the mistakes of the past."

"If the marketing manager develops a plan with minimal input from others in the organization, the plan is much less likely to be successful."

"The trick is to find smart, creative, well-trained, hard-working, and experienced professionals with high marketing IQs who are not intellectually paralyzed by the myths of the past."

"For every decision in the marketing mix there are scores, hundreds, thousands of alternatives, so that to randomly select two or three is just plain dumb."

"The difference between the genders, socioeconomic groups, age groups, and races are attenuating over time, primarily because of the mass media, mass public education, and the rising level of education."

"Consumers want to spend as little time shopping as possible."

"The contemporary marketplace is awash with generic products, competing brands, and line extensions."

"New products fail for five reasons."

"One of the most interesting discoveries our research has turned up is that the most appealing product concept is always the least profitable."

"Heavy users are often price-conscious, deal-prone, and consequently disloyal to brands they buy."

"If most products and services are positioned at all, it's strictly in the minds of their marketing managers."

"The latest fad in marketing research is choice modeling."

"All things considered, we would say that we know little about the effects of advertising on sales and profitability."

"Comparative television commercials, in naming the competition, often help the competitor as much as, or more than, it helps the bill-paying advertiser."

"Media planners don't know a great deal about the relative effectiveness of different media."

"Print offers significant media value with its reach, efficiency, and impact."

"The only thing promotion does is drop the product's price to capture the attention of disloyal brand-switchers."

"Myth: A company cannot measure the effect of public relations and other forms of corporate communications."

"Price sensitivity is not so much a personality characteristic as a function of discretionary income."

"If a company feels it must reduce prices to help sales, it means that it believes the decision-making process most consumers go through is dominated by price."

"We believe that selling is really education and training."

"The single most important determinant for a salesperson's success is trust, signaled by effective listening."

"More and more direct marketing is being done, but fewer and fewer people are responding to offers."

"Test markets are fraught with problems, starting with how companies select them"