If your dream job includes launching a business, then be warned: most business owners have a love/hate relationship with their marketing and advertising. Consider how little time business owners have to devote to the task of promoting their business and combine that with the fact that advertising media options are rapidly changing—and are very often presented in a confusing manner. It is easy to see why most business owners love the promise but hate the actual execution of a successful marketing strategy.
As a result, many new business owners find themselves chasing after an array of marketing tactics instead of implementing a cohesive marketing strategy. Unfortunately, marketing tactics which may result in great success for one business may fail miserably for the next. Yet many business owners attend seminars, buy books, and subscribe to newsletters that do little more than provide a never-ending list of various marketing tactics. They keep gathering these crumbs, hoping to collect enough crumbs and the finding the magical marketing tactic(s) that will turn this collection of crumbs into a slice of toast.
The search for tactics to increase the return on investment dates back to the earliest recorded history. One tactic used by early farmers to improve their farming “return on investment” was to plant discarded fish parts to improve their production of corn. Modern science has shown there are practical scientific principles behind this ancient practice. The decaying fish parts provide the steady supply of nitrogen which corn needs to grow abundantly. It seems the decaying fish parts are a great “lo-tech” method for providing the steady fertilization needs of growing corn plants.
It turns out that in ancient cultures there were two schools of thought about the role of the planting fish with corn. On one hand, there were the cultures that, at some level, seemed to recognize the science behind the practice. Farmers in these cultures believed that the corn was literally feeding upon the decaying fish. So, while they used the “tactic” of planting fish parts with corn, they were aware of the overall strategy behind the tactic, which was to provide nourishment for the plants so they could produce an abundant crop.
However, there were other cultures that also planted fish parts with their crops but did so without any understanding of the science behind the practice. For these cultures, the fish were thought to have magical properties. They believed that the spirit of the dead fish magically helped the plants to grow. These cultures were using the same tactic; however, they were using it without any understanding of the strategy behind the tactic’s success.
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