Kelford Labs Daily: Is it *your* marketing?
The danger of “efficient third parties.”
I was talking to a client the other day about social media, and they were wondering whether they could outsource all of the content to someone else, outside of their organization.
“The problem,” I said, “with outsourcing all of the actual implementation of your marketing is that it ends up looking like everyone else’s.”
As Michael E. Porter once wrote, “The more that rivals outsource activities to efficient third parties, often the same ones, the more generic those activities become.”
“And that’s not differentiation,” I said, “that’s business camouflage.”
You can hire someone to help you design and build your marketing—to help you create the marketing “car”—but you need to be the one driving. The direction needs to come from inside the organization.
Otherwise, you’re not going to end up where you want to go.
So, if your marketing isn’t working, if it’s not having the results you’d hoped for, the first question to ask is, “Is it my marketing?”
Or is it someone else’s?
