Marketing is not a "nice-to-have." It’s an investment in your business that sells more product and increases profits. But there is no textbook formula that dictates the right amount of money to invest in your marketing efforts. What you need to spend depends on your business strategy. In turn, strategy depends on what commercial product, product capacity and delivery capability you have now; what your competitors are doing and not doing; and what you want to accomplish. But there are a number of "syndromes" that will point you in directions NOT to take with your marketing investment (both money and time).

Here’s my baker’s dozen of top marketing investment syndromes to avoid:

1) "Attaboy" syndrome

Excessive marketing investment because it makes the CEO, Board or investors feel/look good–and that’s about it.

2) "Sales staff is supreme" syndrome

Inadequate marketing investment because you’ve already got plenty of "feet on the street"–or worse, because you think that you’ve got to get "feet-on-the-street" without having a marketing strategy.

3) "Super-Bowl" syndrome"

Excessive marketing investment (usually advertising and promotions) to build image or brand awareness–without knowing or caring how profits are impacted.

4) "Everything’s jolly" syndrome

Inadequate marketing investment because "we’ve always done "fine"" with little or no marketing–whatever "fine" is………

5) "The big-ticket PR firm knows best" syndrome

Excessive marketing investment by carefully controlling all outgoing and incoming dialogue--and forgetting to facilitate real conversations in the market.

6) "That’s not the plan, Stan" syndrome

Inadequate marketing investment when you have excellent product, capacity, and delivery capability–only because more marketing dollars are not in the current plan or the budget, even if circumstances have changed radically.

7) "Spin-o-rama" syndrome

Excessive marketing investment (usually advertising, promotion, PR) when you have little or no commercial product (and or capacity) to try and fool the market that you’ve got a lot more..

8) "The hoity-toity" syndrome

Inadequate marketing investment because you think that "marketing" isn’t appropriate for your particular company or industry.

9) "That’s a ‘quality’ problem" (or ‘we’ll worry about that later’) syndrome

Excessive marketing investment when you can’t possibly handle the sales, delivery, and implementation that good marketing can generate.

10) "The bunker mentality" syndrome

Inadequate marketing investment because the economy/market is bad–just keep your head in the sand until "things" get better instead of grabbing a great opportunity.

11) "The marketing inertia" syndrome

Excessive marketing investment because you’ve got to keep that big marketing staff busy.

12) "Keeping up with the Jones’s" syndrome

Doing $ x (and often the same types) of marketing investment as your competitors–they’ve got a billboard on every corner and an ad on the 10:00PM news, so you need to also.

13) "The CFO calls the shots" syndrome

Doing $x plus or minus y% (change from last year) marketing investment next year because that’s what you’re doing with other budget items or because marketing can be most easily trimmed.

Avoid these thirteen syndromes and you’ll have your head on straight to make a reasonable investment in your marketing efforts. I agree with Zyman and others that the amount of marketing investment depends on your evolving business strategies. You may need to invest minimal new marketing dollars now while you are focusing on raising capital, building product, developing capacity and infrastructure. On the other hand, you may need to invest a lot more than you ever imagined and change how your company operates if you really want to sell the amount of product(s) that you’re capable of selling. Regardless, you’ll need to continually adjust your marketing investment and approaches depending on your business strategies.

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Tom Ranseen NoSpinMarketing 615.383.7157