The Forgotten First Rule of Marketing

There was a time when businesses knew that to Market successfully, you must have something to market. It may have been design, innovation, quality, or price. There were many things to offer, but you must have something.

Those days are long gone. Today, leading companies in big industries have decided that the best and most successful strategy is marketing alone, without offering the consumer anything.

Think big pharma, companies that spend more money on marketing than on research and development.

Think big oil, companies that are telling us that exorbitant price at the gas station is the price we must pay for freedom.

Garments is different.  We are not big enough to successfully sell our consumers garbage. Furthermore, while the average consumer may know very little about the intricacies of pharmacology or fossil fuel, everybody knows a great deal about T-shirts and pants, and what they see they do not like. Not only are they rejecting the marketing they are simply not buying the stuff. Even worse, our consumers are returning much of what they had previously bought.

Garment retailers face serious, possibly existential problem, which we do not see.  We might ask, how can a company make money when retail sales continue to fall, while at the same sales of off-price clothing are rising?

The answer may well be that, while management might not know how to run successful business, they seem to know everything about the latest and most sophisticated involute accounting.

At the end of the day company marketing is based on illusions, so too are their profits.