The 30,000 Foot Level

It's common to run across a Marketing Team that is persecuted. "They don't know what they're doing!!" And yes, there are a ton of marketing teams that have absolutely no clue what they're doing ... that's life.

But there are marketing teams that are being persecuted ... they're blamed for problems that they have nothing to do with. Maybe the website has a 2.8% conversion rate and it was 3.3% last year ... "the marketing team is sending us terrible traffic". The Marketing Team blames Google & Facebook. Everybody is pointing at somebody.

Somebody should be pointing at the data. Here's the high level view of Beans ... at 30,000 feet, it is easy to see this isn't a marketing problem.

The business was at $27.4 million two years ago ... it is at $20.8 million today. Yes, there is a problem.

A simple cut of the data by new item sales vs. existing item sales shows us there is a merchandising problem.

• New Items:  Decreased by $6.5 million.
• Existing Items:  Decreased by $0.1 million.

Marketing problems result in equal declines.

Merchandising problems result in uneven and chaotic outcomes.

Here's a worse problem ... if you have a new merchandise problem today, you'll have an existing merchandise problem tomorrow. New items become existing items, and if you are down 40% in new items demand you'll be down a bunch in existing item demand in a year or two.

One simple table ... the one illustrated above ... it's not hard to run. If you are in marketing you need to know what the table illustrates. You need to know "what" specific problem you are solving, and it's frequently not the problem others in your company think you need to solve.

P.S.:  Click here for information about your own "Categories" analysis.