Let's Discuss The System

Last Thursday the Packers and the Lions played a highly entertaining game, won by Detroit 34-31 on the last play of the game.

The "easy discussions" surrounded Detroit going for it on 4th down five (5) times, succeeding four times. That's something that any muttonhead can talk about ... "I WOULDN'T HAVE DONE THAT".

Nuanced discussions focused on other topics. On Thursday both Detroit and Green Bay leveraged elements of an offensive philosophy from the 1930s - 1950s (and high school football in the 1990s) called the Wing-T.

• Detroit using elements of the Wing-T offense (click here).

Many teams are running variants of the Wing-T or Single Wing ... Green Bay won two games with a backup quarterback by turning the clock back seventy years ... Arizona uses Kyler Murray in variants of the Single Wing ... and of course San Francisco / Los Angeles Rams / Miami (and even Kansas City) heavily leverage these concepts.

These teams have an offensive philosophy ... they are running a specific offensive "system" (in general, Green Bay / Miami / San Francisco / LA Rams all come out of the Shanahan "tree"). They're generally good at running the football, and they use a lot of window dressing / motion to deceive the defense.

Yeah, this brings me back to you.

In the NFL, offenses look to target weaknesses in the defense.

In your business, the marketer is looking to take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses in his/her merchandising assortment. This is opposite of mainstream thinking, where you are trying to take "market share" from competitors.

• Example:  Mainstream thinking applies deep discounts to increase open rates / click-through rates in email marketing. In my system, the marketer identifies winning items (i.e. best sellers) that align with the purchase history of individual customers (i.e. there are different winning items that work with different customers), crafting a personalized email campaign to each customer that yields increased open rates, click-through rates, and purchases.

Do you see the difference?

A weak marketer applies a discount (hurry, 60% off will end soon ... yeah, same message for the past three weeks, thanks).

A strong marketer with a "system" uses merchandise, avoiding weaknesses in the assortment, attacking strengths at a customer level. Customer response increases (like yards per play increase in a football game). Your odds of winning (i.e. 10% pre-tax profit on an annual basis) increase.

More on the topic of a marketing "system" tomorrow.