Back in the day people called it Marketing.
Just a nice, simple, single word.
But meaningless.
So prefixes and postfixes were added over the years to improve the definition (and more importantly, allow new marketers to position themselves as the leader of the ‘new method’).
The most common in recent years has been Education Based Marketing.
Give away tons of value to win trust and gain sales.
Before this, there was Permission Marketing, coined by Seth Godin, which came about due to the nature of autoresponders and double optin/spam ethics.
The reality is that Permission Marketing has been used for years by both ethical and very unethical sales people.
It’s all about getting a ‘Yes’.
The best marketing of all in my opinion is what I call ‘Prescriptive Marketing’.
This idea came to me courtesy of my friend Lee McIntyre who used the brilliant metaphor of how a doctor diagnoses problems and only when the issue is identified is a prescription issued.
This could be called ‘Diagnoses Marketing’ but firstly that sounds naff, and secondly prescriptions relate directly to results.
Prescriptive (or perhaps prescription) Marketing is laser focused unlike Education Based Marketing, which can be quite generic in nature.
The downside is that it is only cost effective when selling high value goods or services.
It is at its best when concentrated on a single prospect, although it can be used for groups provided they are all very closely related in their needs.
As in all good marketing, the first step is to identify your audience or prospect.
Step two is to discover what their problems and issues are.
Step three is to suggest the right solution (diagnoses).
And the final step is to prescribe it.
This is one of the processes we go through in detail in Advanced Business School.
If you would like to find out more, click here.
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