Quotes & Sayings About Marketers

Marketing by interrupting people isn't cost-effective anymore. You can't afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing messages, in large groups, and hope that some will send you money. Instead, the future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk. — Seth

Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. — Marc Andreessen

Just like the VCR opened the film and TV industries to unimaginable new revenue streams, search, RSS and the Internet will do the same for marketers and media companies. — John Battelle

The urgent can drown out the important. — David Meerman Scott

Anytime you open a business, you have to be effective in promoting whether it's a franchise or not. You'll need to learn to be a Web marketer extraordinaire. There's plenty of material out there. — Dave Ramsey

Good marketers tell a story. — Seth Godin

Unconscious consumerism preys on the uncentered. Once we lose touch with our center, we don't know who we are anymore, and marketers fill the void by telling us who we ought to be. — Jeff Brown

I think editors are excellent marketers. They know their audience and produce copy to appeal to them - they just don't call it marketing. — David Robinson

Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us. — Douglas Rushkoff

The world is cheapened when everyone sees it with a marketers eye. — Lucas Conley

When marketers influence habits, they influence peoples' self-identity. And so when a group or company does something that doesn't correspond to our core values, it feels like a betrayal. — Charles Duhigg

One thing I point out is, a lot of people tooting the horn of amateurism, actually, these people were professionals. Some are professors who are employed full time. Others are marketers or business consultants. — Astra Taylor

I wait, washed, brushed, fed, like a prize pig. Sometime in the eighties they invented pig balls, for pigs who were being fattened in pens. Pig balls were large colored balls; the pigs rolled them around with their snouts. The pig marketers said this improved their muscle tone; the pigs were curious, they liked having something to think about. I read about that in Introduction to Psychology; that, and the chapter on caged rats who'd give themselves electric shocks for something to do. And the one on the pigeons trained to peck a button that made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first one got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a little later. The third group never gave up. They'd peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked?
I wish I had a pig ball. — Margaret Atwood

Stop trying to find the formula that will instantly make your idea into a winner. Instead of being scientists, the best marketers are artists. They realize that whatever is being sold is being purchased, because it creates an emotional want, not because it fills a simple need. — Seth Godin

Our job as marketers and leaders, is to create vibrant pockets, not to hunt for mass. — Seth Godin

The ironic thing is that marketers have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they're interrupting us even more! — Seth Godin

More than ever, we express ourselves with what we buy and how we use what we buy. Extensions of our personality, totems of our selves, reminders of who we are or would like to be. Great marketers don't make stuff. They make meaning. — Seth

Many thinkers have tried to "naturalize" consumerism in that way, including most social Darwinists, Austrian School economists (Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard), Chicago School economists (George Stigler, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker), Darwinian libertarians, globalization advocates, management gurus, and marketers. Their model (which I call the Wrong Conservative Model, because I think it's wrong, and because it's usually advocated by political conservatives) is: human nature + free markets = consumerist capitalism — Geoffrey Miller

The only way to know if the screening is saving lives is by doing a randomized trial. It's easy to forget this and assume that if technology can find more cancer, it will save more lives. Marketers exploit this assumption. Don't fall for it. — H. Gilbert Welch

All Marketers are liars tell stories, — Seth Godin

Once a teen has been identified as part of the 'target market,' he knows he's done for. The object of the game is to confound the marketers, and keep one's own, authentic culture from showing up at the shopping mall as a prepackaged corporate product. — Douglas Rushkoff

My one great fear about advertising and media is that they, too, will become irrevocably unbundled, that marketers will no longer have need of media, — Jeff Jarvis

One can only be in awe of the creativity of chocolate marketers. My take is that if there is a health benefit, it is small. — Marion Nestle

Marketers have long known that a name can make all the difference when you're trying to move the merch. The kiwifruit was once the Chinese gooseberry, after all - at least until the produce peddlers wised up - and the Chilean sea bass was once the singularly unappetizing Patagonian toothfish. — Jeffrey Kluger

The key is to be true to your community's norms and values. You can't just force yourself on people and try to sell them something they don't want - that's good advice for marketers generally, but particularly on community-driven sites like MySpace. You have to find ways to add value to your members' lives while being consistent with your brand's identity. — Chris DeWolfe

Marketers spend millions developing strategies to identify children's predilections and then capitalize on their vulnerabilities. Young people are fooled for a while, but then develop defense mechanisms, such as media-savvy attitudes or ironic dispositions. Then marketers research these defenses, develop new countermeasures, and on it goes. — Douglas Rushkoff

No longer dependent on 30 second spots, today's marketers need a never-ending stream of content. — David Louis Edelman

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he claimed, 'In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.' Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: 'People react to fear, not love. They don't teach that in Sunday school, but it's true.' That principle, which guided the late president's political strategy throughout his career, is the sine qua non of contemporary political campaigning. Marketers of products and services ranging from car alarms to TV news programs have taken it to heart as well.

The short answer to why Americans harbor so many misbegotten fears is that immense power and money await those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic substitutes. — Barry Glassner

At first, we couldn't be establishment, because we didn't have any money. We were guerrilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit. But, as we became No. 1 in our industry, we've had to modify our culture and become a bit more planned. — Phil Knight

The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we - and the young, particularly - spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation. — Douglas Rushkoff

I'm the master marketer. — Shaquille O'Neal

I never expected, when I had a daughter, that one of my most important jobs would be to protect her childhood from becoming a marketers' land grab. — Peggy Orenstein

Ordinary people can spread good and bad information about brands faster than marketers. — Ray Johnson

End-users not technologies shape the market. Consequently marketers need to stay abreast not only of technological developments but also of the way people respond to them. — Matt Haig

Potential to increase the lifetime value of the customer. Usually marketing departments assume that the lifetime value of a customer is fixed when doing their ROI calculations. We view the lifetime value of a customer to be a moving target that can increase if we can create more and more positive emotional associations with our brand through every interaction that a person has with us. Another common trap that many marketers fall into is focusing too much on trying to figure out how to generate a lot of buzz, when really they should be focused on building engagement and trust. I can tell you that my mom has zero buzz, but when she says something, I listen. To that end, most of our efforts on the customer service and customer experience side actually happen after we've already made the sale and taken a customer's credit card number. — Tony Hsieh

All marketers are storytellers. Only the losers are liars. — Seth Godin

We'd like to believe that efficient, useful, cost-effective products and services are the way to succeed. That hard work is its own reward. Most marketers carry around a worldview that describes themselves as innovators, not storytellers. — Seth Godin

Unexpectedly, I'm here now, so I need to let all the U.S. marketers know that Asians are not different. We are all the same. — Psy

There was a time when academia was society's refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all. — David Graeber

The consistent growth in overall revenues shows marketers may be shifting more of their total advertising budgets to online. This is a natural development as research shows more consumers are spending a larger percentage of their media time online, while the flow of advertising dollars follows. — David Silverman

Everyone dies, and before that, most people eventually lose some of their faculties. So some people worry that as marketers get better at targeting the elderly, the line between advertising and unscrupulous manipulation will be harder to discern. — Charles Duhigg

Marketers want to get their messages in front of you. They must get their messages in front of you, just to survive. The only problem is-do you really want more marketing messages? — Seth Godin

I feel called to minister to telephone marketers. You know, the kind who call at inconvenient hours and deliver their spiel before you can say a word." Immediately I flashed back to the times I have responded rudely or simply hung up. "All day long these sales callers hear people curse at them and slam the phone down," she continued. "I listen attentively to their pitch, then I try to respond kindly, though I almost never buy what they're selling. Instead, I ask about their personal life and whether they have any concerns I can pray for. Often they ask me to pray with them over the phone, and sometimes they are in tears. They're people, after all, probably underpaid, and they're surprised when someone treats them with common courtesy. — Philip Yancey

Here's how I work: It's 2013, and most marketers are operating like it's 2009. I'm always trying to market like it's 2015, but not like it's 2020. A lot of my contemporaries who understand where the world is going, go too far out, and aren't practical. I have always prided myself on being visionary, with a heavy practicality. — Gary Vaynerchuk

The masses have been ridiculing and criticizing referral marketers for over 50 years. Meanwhile; these highly trained, ferociously dedicated — Steve Siebold

In all fairness to the auction companies ? most companies are not car experts, they are marketers. I caution buyers to make sure that they have done their homework before they raise their hand and not after. — Mark Hyman, M.D.

Good marketers see consumers as complete human beings with all the dimensions real people have. — Jonah Sachs

Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them - and us. — Nicholas Kristof

Content Marketing is all the Marketing that's left. — Seth Godin

We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care. We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference. Some organizations haven't realized this yet, or haven't articulated it, but we need artists. — Seth Godin

It is impossible to objectively define how free a market is. This is a political definition. Government is always involved, and those free marketers are as politically motivated as anyone. — Ha-Joon Chang

The main mistake most marketers make is to use Twitter primarily as an extension of their blog, a place to push a link to content they have posted elsewhere. — Gary Vaynerchuk

Social enables word of mouth at an unprecedented scale. Its most powerful effect, through reviews and recommendations, is to put product quality and value for money as the key to success in commerce. Social brings a level of transparency that prevents marketers from advertising their way to success without underlying product quality. — Roelof Botha

Today's smart marketers don't sell products; they sell benefit packages. They don't sell purchase value only; they sell use value. — Philip Kotler

I always point people to the article '1,000 True Fans' by Kevin Kelly. If you choose your thousand ideal customers or readers properly and find the single author blog that targets that audience, you never have to do any more marketing. You're done. That is a lesson that very few product developers and marketers have learned, and it's unfortunate. — Tim Ferriss

Marketers know - no matter how deep the emotional connection or brand loyalty - when a product does not perform, rational thought overtakes emotion, and most consumers make a new choice. — Mark McKinnon

Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party's fortunes from the president's. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn't be left with a ruined brand,- as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership. — Peggy Noonan

The nation's image has become more like a chameleon - accepting whatever trend marketers concoct. Gone are the days of reverencing a holy God in the church or within ourselves. Yet the Bible tells us, "Happy is the man who is always reverent" (Proverbs 28:14 NKJV). — Billy Graham

Social media isn't the end-all-be-all, but it offers marketers unparalleled opportunity to participate in relevant ways. It also provides a launchpad for other marketing tactics. Social media is not an island. It's a high-power engine on the larger marketing ship. — Matthew Dickman

Marketers need to spend less time making promises and more time keeping them. — Seth

In today's world, marketers reach inside the home and attempt to figure out not what's good for your daughter, because that is not their business, but what deep desires they can manipulate, stimulate and ostensibly satisfy in order to produce cold, hard cash. — Maggie Gallagher

Marketers have to move upstream now. We have to stop being the last step in the process and start being the first step. — Seth Godin

We think the whole world's going to change, and forget that human beings are still human beings; we have the same five senses, we still interact the same way, we still love and hate the same way, but marketers lose track of that. But then it comes down to earth. — Michael K. Powell

Brand marketers don't believe that ad-tech companies view brands as true partners. Ad-tech companies think brand marketers are paying attention to the wrong things. And publishers, with a few important exceptions, feel taken advantage of by everyone. — John Battelle

Marketers have turned advertising into an interactive process. Using relationships and frequency and permission, — Seth Godin

As good marketers, we like to tinker with things and make them better. — Michael Freeman

Marketers are out there trying to figure out how to get your money out of your child. — Maggie Gallagher

In 1951, a man bought a pickup truck because he needed to load things up and move them. Things like bricks and bags of feed. Somewhere along the line trendsetters and marketers got involved, and now we buy pickups
big, horse-powered, overbuilt, wide-assed, comfortable pickups
so that we may stick our key in the ignition of an icon, fire up an image, and drive off in a cloud of connotations. I have no room to talk. I long to get my International running part so I can drive down roads that no longer exist. — Michael Perry

People do not buy fortune cookies because they taste better than every other cookie on the shelf. They buy them for the delight they deliver at the end of a meal. Marketers spend most of their time selling the cookie, when what they should be doing is finding a way to create a better fortune. Of course your job is to bake a good cookie, the very best that you can, but you must also spend time figuring out how to tell a great story. — William Mougayar

We need to write books that publicists and marketers and booksellers and book club leaders and librarians and readers can get excited about. That have something about them that makes them stand out. That makes them shine. — M.J. Rose

The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late. — Seth Godin

Sameness is what marketers want us to want. — Thomas M. Disch

So, if consumers are like roaches, then marketers must forever be dreaming up new concoctions for industrial-strength Raid. — Naomi Klein

To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while we're at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure is consumption. This dependence marketers call "freedom." Cooking — Michael Pollan

Guerrilla marketers do not rely on the brute force of an outsized marketing budget. Instead, they rely on the brute force of a vivid imagination. — Jay Conrad Levinson

Not all marketing people are writers, but all writers must learn to be marketers. — Joanne Kraft

As communicators and marketers, people are so accustomed to thinking from the 'top down.' Finding the great analyst or the famous journalist who will endorse what you do and tell the rest of the world to go and buy your product. — Guy Kawasaki

The point is not that angering people should be the goal for every brand. It's that attempting to avoid controversy at all costs is sometimes the riskier option. It can deprive a brand of its distinctiveness and edge. Too often, marketers strive to please the broadest number of people possible. The result can be communications that no one hates. But no one loves either. — Clive Veroni

Marketers reinforce the idea - a false one - that celebrity is available to everyone. — Mal Fletcher

Marketing today is much more like sailing than driving. Your boat is the brand. If you point your boat in the right direction, follow the winds/currents, and steer, you will get the boat to go where you want it. Marketers should become the wind, but accept that they're at the mercy of the currents and weather — Steve Rubel

Most marketers think there's a concept called a product life cycle. Once you realize that the world is organized by jobs that need to be done, you understand that product life cycles don't exist. — Clayton Christensen

Marketers keep inventing desires, necessities for you and for me. I need this. I need that. I need. I need. It's the need of a smoking fit. If you don't smoke that cigarette now, you'll die-when in reality you die because you succumb to the rage and rattle of the needy greed that keeps you busy needing more and more things. Is this the American Dream-the greedy need? — Giannina Braschi

The rise of digital technology put marketers in a bind. No longer a captive audience, consumers were splitting their time across devices, social networks and websites. — Shawn Amos

A salaried job trains us to be "right" all the time and induces an entitlement mentality. This is because we get paid the same amount no matter what work we are producing, and we begin to see this is fair and right, and we begin being trained to think we are right all the time. When we become salespeople and marketers, we have to leave all of that behind. — Eben Pagan

Marketers can target Sponsored Updates to any segment of our premium audience based on professional profile data across more than 225 million members. — David Hahn

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. — Daniel Kahneman

When the vast baby-boom generation exploded into adolescence in the 1960s, marketers exulted. Advertising consultants, always eager to coin a phrase, began happily explaining to corporations the difference between 'teenyboppers' and 'counterculture consumers.' — Charles Duhigg

When it comes to content, the best marketers know that self promotion is good! — Kieran Flanagan

What's interesting is that most free-marketers don't seem to want a free market at all, but a status quo market. The market in the United States is anything but free. If it were, big business would have to survive without corporate welfare to the tune of about $1 trillion (that's trillion) in government subsidies, the majority of which, about $650 billion, go to the fossil fuel industry! They are living off of the public dole on subsidies totaling billions of dollar - that we hand out either directly, or through tax breaks for their big corporations - with the false assumption that they are creating jobs. They are not. They are creating yachts, Leer Jets, and McMansions with swimming pools. — Steve Bivans

The centerpiece of Obamanomics - raising taxes on high earners and investors and lowering them on the middle class - is attacked by free-marketers for penalizing economic success and possibly further stalling economic growth. — Nina Easton

Find the human in the technology. The currency marketers trade in has not changed even if the methods have. Emotion is what we exchange. — Simon Mainwaring

Marketers need to adapt a "members first" approach to content. — David Hahn

Advertisers and marketers should be looking to bring new experiences to different parts of the brain. It's a more profound idea than just dropping a billboard into a video game. — Jaron Lanier

It's a very simple example to show that if you miss one step in a process in can cost you an enormous amount of time and money to fix. With a checklist, you can write it down and give it some someone else for them to do successfully. Checklists require discipline and organization, which is something internet marketers have to master. — Brian Tracy

While I am not saying Facebook cannot be a wonderland for marketers, I am still waiting to see the proof of it, and so should every reporter. — Kara Swisher

Digital brand integration is part of the evolution of product placement. It's simply another tool marketers use to get products integrated into shows. If you can put it in a package, we can put it in a show. — David Brenner

Well, in a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization - against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while we're at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure is consumption. This dependence marketers call freedom. — Michael Pollan

Good marketers measure. — Seth Godin

People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction. — Brian Halligan

The path that leads through Latin and alebra is not the path to material success. But it may suggest much more: that understanding things is a waste of time; that if you want to succeed in the world and have a happy family and a nice home and a BMW you should not try to understand things but just add up the numbers or press the buttons or do whatever else it is that marketers are so richly rewarded for doing — J.M. Coetzee