Something interesting: how marketing works

Firstly, I am not in marketing. I am a freelance writer and so I do write stuff that could be seen as marketing but I am no marketer. Sounds like Deadpool saying he’s no hero. Well in this case, I am no villain!

If you have ever wondered why you get so many calls about being in an accident or a loan you never took out then keep reading, the answer is actually very simple. This was explained to me when I went on a day long interview to be a marketer, I lasted that day and then ran the fuck away.

Marketing at its core is very basic. The principle is for a company to sell someone something but how do they know who to sell it to or who is interested in buying it? The quickest and dirtiest way of doing it is getting in the field and trying to sell it. This way the marketing people make their money quickly, the company gets the people they want and everyone is happy, apart from the people who are bombarded with cold calls.

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say a lawn mowing company comes to me for help getting customers. They say they normally charge £25 per lawn and I’ll get £10 for each customer I bag them.

If I knocked on 10 of my neighbours doors (cold call them) and said that I will mow their lawn for £25, one might say yes. So I have made £10, hardly a living but ok. But, if I hire 10 people to knock on 10 peoples doors a day for 5 days a week, that’s £500, say they make a fiver each time (working on commission only) and I make a fiver each time. I have just made £50.

Then I put an advert in the paper saying “want to make a lot of money easily, give me a call) I hire 100 people. They knock on 10 doors a day for a week, that’s 50 doors per person a week, 5,000 doors in total. That’s £500, half of that is mine, £250. I have made £250 in a week for putting an ad in a newspaper.

However, there is an easier way. Set up a call centre with 100 people on the phones, calling from 9 till 5 each day. Each person have to average 100 calls a day to keep their job, each sale of a mowed lawn gives them a commission. That’s 10,000 calls a day, 5 days a week that’s 50,000 calls a week. let’s stick with 10% of people will say yes, that’s £5,000 a week.

Then, I promote my best sellers and give them their own offices and their own staff, I take a percentage of what they make but they make serious dough. They tell their staff that they can make serious dough too, those staff work hard because they want dough, all marketers want dough. They end up with their own offices. Soon you have an entire network of marketers selling lawn mowing services and a bunch of other stuff. Cold calling everyone, they designed scripts for the sales so a monkey can do the job and they are off running.

The maths is most likely wrong in this as I am not good at maths but that’s a very basic look at how marketing works. It’s a very simple idea that works very well, if it didn’t, we would never of heard of marketing. As usual, you know the rules, if you found something out you didn’t know or just found this article interesting, share it with your friends. See you tomorrow for another villainous tale!