There’s a difference between ivory tower marketing and real-world marketing.
While sitting in class, getting my MBA, our marketing professor stood at the front and taught us all sorts of stuff. Everything from competitive strategy to advertising regulations to conjoint analysis. Everything except what mattered most — people.
Discovering the advertisers and copywriters of the past opened my eyes. I read books by David Ogilvy and Claude Hopkins. It was hard to believe this all fell under the same umbrella of marketing.
These old copywriters took an entirely different approach. It’s said that Gary Halbert used to visit his local bar, buy a round of beers, and read everyone his sales copy. Gauging their reactions was how he learned about people.
Halbert’s approach is a far cry from my professor’s lecture on conjoint analysis — yet both approaches are considered marketing.
Want to know where to spend your time with marketing? Study people. And the nice thing is that you couldn’t pick a more interesting or exciting topic to study than our human family.
