Is Your Marketing Strategy a Recipe for Failure?

That's the million dollar question. If you insist on making Purina Dog Chow, please do yourself a favor and don't do new marketing. But if you want to thrive, realize you have the opportunity to make parrot chow. If no one else is currently making parrot chow, you have the opportunity to make the one and only best food for parrots, and you can find people online who will be looking desperately for you. You can engage with them and sell a fair amount of parrot chow. That's not a meatball.

What's the worst example of marketing you've seen in the last year?

The presidential primaries. All you need to do is watch the candidates try to tell different stories to different people. The mistake they make is that now YouTube prevents you from telling different stories to different people. When someone stands up and announces on one day that they're open minded and secular and the next day they announce that God himself made him the leader in the polls, people notice the discrepancy, right?

What would you do if you were in charge of marketing Mitt Romney?

The future lies in politicians who can always tell the same story no matter who they're talking to. The challenge for Mitt Romney is, like all politicians, he wants to cater to the people in the room at that moment. The memory of the public keeps getting longer and the record of history keeps getting better, so it's getting harder to get away with that.

What would you do if you were in charge of marketing toys made in china?

China staked out the position of "we are cheaper." That's a great position—90 percent of the people in this country will do anything to save a dollar. The problem is someone can always try to be a little cheaper. It's not a particularly loyal position. The marketing they started with isn't long term. Someone is going to be cheaper than China tomorrow—Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Nigeria or somebody. Marketing is not about the tactic of today, it's about the long-term strategy.

I would start by saying, "We made a big mistake by claiming we were cheaper, we need to be something else—faster, more flexible, more innovative." That's what you need to sell people on, because very few people are willing to poison their kids for a dollar.