Marketing, first of all, is a state of mind – Talk Marketing 044 – Danny Abramovich

Danny has been teaching and consulting on marketing internationally for 25 years. For Danny marketing is a behavioural science – which is a bold and interesting claim. If you are looking to do better with your marketing you might do well to check out this chat 🙂 00:00 Introductions 02:41 How are you qualified to talk to us about marketing strategy, international marketing and marketing as a behavioural science? 10:33 How should people be using the various marketing methodologies? 14:05 Who do you work with and how do you add value to their lives? 16:58 Why is it that businesses don’t invest in marketing strategy? 20:20 How should marketers be contributing to the profitability of their businesses? 29:58 How could marketers better communicate the value of marketing strategy? 38:39 Why is it that so many business fail? Is there a marketing skills gap? 42:00 If we were to establich standards in marketing what would they look like? 47:14 How does your marketing strategy solution operate? 52:27 What is your recommendation for business that would like to be doing better with their marketing? 55:18 What are your reading recommendations? Martin Henley Okay, so the first one is, how are you qualified to talk to us about can we focus on marketing strategy? Because I’m interested in that? Is that okay? Danny Abramovich 2:51 We can marketing is a science, it’s a behavioural science, we can take you to different directions. And, you know, strategy is a word, which is not very clear. It’s very used, but not very clear and often used wrongly, if you want to, we can select marketing strategy, but we can do. Martin Henley 3:12 Now, you claim that marketing is a behavioural science, I’m kind of interested in that as well. Okay, let’s start. We’ll start with the question how are you qualified to talk to us about these things, marketing being a behavioural science, strategic marketing, international marketing, how are you qualified? Danny Abramovich 3:32 So I’m comfortable to think and discuss this with you here today I’m happy to be here. It’s because for many years, I’m a consultant. So I listen to people and I talk to people and companies, of course, namely SMEs, you cannot handle 400 clients over 22 years, if they’re not SMEs, otherwise, it would be much less number of businesses to help. The decision was SMEs, it’s more eye level, it’s more effective. You learn a lot from your clients, same for students. I have taught for so many years, more than 20 As you said, nine countries became 11 countries that’s not an issue, but 1000s of people and you learn from them, they read a lot there, they have good questions sometimes. They contradict you sometimes depending on the culture. So you learn a lot and and marketing is not just about adding a word like strategy, or international, or a new venture, or communication first of all a state of mind as far as I’m concerned. You see my my hair is quite grey, and I have this experience even even the shirt here is grey today, because life is colourful and interesting but we have a lot of experience and we were trying to share with you today as well. It’s all about this behavioural science, which means people, we know what they buy, but we don’t know always why they buy. So we have to go into their mind and like in psychology to understand basic things like needs, wants, preferences, and so on and so on. Martin Henley 5:08 Okay, so let’s go after this thing first. Nobody has ever been so bold as to tell me that marketing is a behavioural science, behavioural science. So let’s talk about that because I don’t think people think of marketing as a science do they? My experience is that people think that marketing is their opportunity to do whatever they want, you know, this is their opportunity to really throw their character at their business, and their creativity and all of these things but I don’t believe anyone’s following any formulas are their formulas to marketing? Danny Abromovich 5:50 I think not really formulas, those that try to enhance formulas failed completely. I’m talking about the good old founders of modern marketing. We have extensive books, and you can read all your life about those theories but these are formulas which are helping to think when everything is open, you need sometimes guidelines. So guidelines are not bad. In fact, there are no standards in this discipline, it’s a discipline. Unfortunately, when I’m travelling around, I see people that have selected this discipline, sometimes not by default, just by saying, listen, finance is not for me, supply chain, less, legal, law is not really relevant for me. So what’s left HR, or marketing and all these kind of soft sciences as we can call them, and then marketing is selected. Sometimes people come from sales, which is another path.

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