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How He Measured His Marketing’s ROI
Here’s how he measured the effectiveness of his marketing: it “disappears into people’s lives.”
I was thinking today about one of the great leaders in the communication and transformational thinking fields – Werner Erhard*. What got me thinking about his famous quote was when a client commented about the unique way I communicated his company’s USP and how effective it was.
It reminded me of what Erhard always said, something that took me years to fully grok. In my client’s case, I wasn’t consciously trying to communicate in any particular way — I was just intending to be effective at it.
But Erhard always said, “I’ll know The Training is effective when it disappears into people’s lives.”
Granted it was his criteria for the effectiveness of the est Training, but it was also his criteria (as it should be any businesspersons’ criteria) for the effectiveness of marketing — it just disappears into their natural way of doing and saying things. Which is another way of saying ‘becomes part of the corporate culture,’ which is another way of saying ‘gets into the company’s DNA.’
You get the idea — there are a number of different ways to say the same thing.
Now, what does “disappear” mean? In this context it certainly appears to be an odd term, doesn’t it? To “disappear” simply means that it become so natural, such an automatic part of the ‘company DNA’ that no one thinks that much about it — it just already is.
Not a bad way to get the message out, right? And if it’s a part of your company’s DNA, its essence . . . then you hardly need to train your people to remember to say it, right?
* = There is a lot of nonsense and allegations about Erhard — much of it proven false over time — most notably the character assassination piece that “60 Minutes” ran in the ’90’s. But to those things . . . let someone else tackle them because they’re outside the scope of this post and the blog.
Besides, that’s what Google is for.
By Walter |
Topics: It's A Good Thing |