Quirky, Quick Quintessence Marketing!

Now I wonder what letter we have reached in my reverse alphabet of anti-marketing… Not easy that one, but prepare to be quenched in quixotic, quaint, quizzical and highly questionable ideas. Yes, the letter Q could, on the face of it, be slightly bothersome, but to the lateral-thinking anti-marketeer, it is just another quarrelsome and querulous letter. So, without more ado, let’s get stuck into this quizzical letter.

OK, for starters, and I know it’s not quite anti-marketing, it would be rude not to kick off with the word - QUARANTINE. This is a great Q word which has singlehanded managed to destroy many businesses whatever your marketing or anti-marketing thoughts. But enough of that bad boy.

Speed and being QUICK is certainly a major aspect of anti-marketing (and already beautifully covered in a previous blog under the incendiary headline of ‘Better to be quick and second rate than fantastic but slow’. Being quick is the reason that Amazon is now the richest corporation on the planet. It is the bedrock of today’s digital society where people have become more impatient than a two year old at Christmas. No longer do we patiently wait for things. It has been claimed that last year WH Smiths experienced a sizeable drop in online sales when their site slowed by less than half a second. It has become that bad. If we can’t click straight through to our destination, we click somewhere else.

And linked to being QUICK are QR codes of course. Designed to make shopping even faster, QR codes are a future where we won’t even need a keyboard anymore. Probably not a brain either. Just a wallet with instant Apple QUICK-PAYMENT.

And so we reach the elevated plateau of what is called QUINTESSENCE MARKETING. We now are drifting into the choppy waters of postmodernist marketing in all its most colourful forms. But it’s not as quirky as it sounds. The term was first coined by three renowned professors and marketeers out to find a new angle on this messy business. So what are we talking about here? Well, it’s the old chestnut of businesses not just offering products, but offering a complete service. It involves lots of lists too and stuff like concepts, entities and implementation. It concentrates on creating ‘value’ and trust in the brand, while relegating the product at the expense of developing relationships with the punters out there. Get their attention, belief and sometimes, illogical trust, and you’ve made it! There’s also the importance of the staff. The customer is no longer king or QUEEN here. The staff are! Yes, that’s right. Concentrate on making them happy and you get delighted customers as a delicious bye-product.

And yes, you guessed it, I love Quintessence Marketing – it sort of says it all about today’s marketplace, where being nice to customers really is the way forward and not treating them as potential sacks of money or points on a spreadsheet or graph.

If you’re interested enough to want to know more then copy and paste the link below. There’s also another book on The Quintessence of Sales – another masterclass in anti-marketing… with lots more lovely lists, too!

https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-quintessence-of-marketing/id895685094

And that’s it for Q. Note that I’ve avoided words like QUALITY or QUALIFIED LEAD, mainly because in today’s digital world both concepts DON’T EXIST anymore. Really. Quality is so subjective that it actually means nothing, while qualified lead is an anachronism of a tired modernist age where people actually did SWOT diagrams and expected answers. We laugh at them now, I know!

Incidentally, in case you're wondering... the picture above is of a QUOKKA - a smaller version of a wallaby which loves humans, smiles a lot, is very trusting, but get upset tummies if they eat too many biscuits. I somehow feel they epitomise anti-marketing in all sorts of ways!

Next stop on this odyssey is the letter P in all its prurient, playful, pleasant, popular, poignant, passionate, proud, prosperous and hopefully, priceless forms!

For more on anti-marketing look no further than:

https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/adrian-liley/the-anti-marketeers-handbook/paperback/product-1665dwpk.html?page=1&pageSize=4