Why?  Everyone thinks they’re good at it!

All joking aside, it’s true. Everyone from your brother to your boss has got their own definition of what marketing is and what makes it great (or horrendous, or remarkable, or offensive, or inspired…)

So much so that it can make it quite difficult for someone in my shoes to be confident my team and I are hitting the mark.

If you’re feeling my pain, then don’t miss this list of “10 Companies with Insanely Great Marketing.”

Of course you’ll glean insights from legends like Apple, Nike and Geico (I confess, I can’t get enough of Maxwell, the pig who cries “weee weee weeeee” all the way home. Never gets old.)

But as much as we all have our favorites, I think we all know that great marketing is much more than catchy tag lines, cute characters and memorable 30-second spots.

So how then do we define this cryptic crusade we call “marketing?” Well, like everyone else, the author has an opinion.

He writes: “Marketing creates and promotes products and services customers will pay for. Great marketing does it consistently better than the competition.”

He goes on to caution “Everybody has an opinion, everybody wants to have a say and everybody thinks their ‘focus group of one’ is more important than the actual target audience.”

Sound like higher ed to you?

How many times have you been in a meeting discussing an email broadcast, event, website or brochure and wanted to scream “You’re not the target audience Mr. 65-year-old Archaeology Professor!” (All due respect to Archaeology Professors by the way. Love me some Indiana Jones).

My advice for higher ed, for what it’s worth: We need to focus more on our audience and make it more about them and less about us. We need to sound like human beings and connect with real people by sounding like a real person. And, above all, we’ve got to cut through the noise by keeping it simple.

Because however you define it, marketing won’t make them act if it doesn’t first make them care.

Read “10 Companies with Insanely Great Marketing”

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