During the last 7 months or so since contributing in a serious way to this blog, I have learnt a number of things.
1. Its bloody hard work
2. Don't ever underestimate how intense competition can get
3. Loyal readers are why I continue
4. Marketing can be more important than content (even though I hope I have
improved my content over the last 7 months)
Marketing such as this, helps push products that
have little real benefit for the consumer but sell
more because of the appeal of its advertised image.
While the first point maybe obvious to those seasoned writers who have been doing this for years, and business leaders should know instinctively the second point. Point number three is more of a personal nature but it is the importance of marketing that I wish to principally discuss here.
When one thinks of the triumph of marketing over content, ones interest naturally leans to the granddaddy of all when it comes to marketing, Coca Cola.
The advertising of the sugar, water, caffeine and CO2 concoction has been filled with much mystique and hype since the product began and hasn't ceased in this way in the product's 100 plus years of existence.
The origins of Coke's marketing success comes from those traveling charlatans who used to go from town to town in the USA, boasting of the properties of the latest elixir that would "cure all".
In the case of Coke it started as one of these types of elixirs but it at least had a bit of a pick me up quality to it, from the sugar and caffeine, and other substances in its earlier guise.
The early backers seized on this traveling salesman mystique and it has been used and refined over the years to the point where Coke is the most recognised brand in the world, and has been for many years.
A huge amount of marketing dollars were used to push the fizzy water over the last 100 years and the ploys used to keep the drinks mystery and image have been many and varied.
During the company's boom years of the 1940s, American soldiers were supplied with the sweet brown stuff by Coca Cola wherever the war took them and the image that Coke was the epitome of fighting for the "American dream" was then cemented in the minds of not just Americans, but many other countries that fought side by side them.
Clever marketing on Coke's part.
The fact that this product, if consumed in large quantities, can, make you tubby, rot your teeth and has no benefit to the body in a nutritional way is largely forgotten because the consumer is constantly bombarded with images of attractive, athletic, young people enjoying the "Coke lifestyle".
A whole host of dangerous and worthless products from Cigarettes to most home cleaning products, are successful because of great and or constant marketing.
It is a masterstroke of marketing an image for a product that has no real benefit to its consumers.
I know, they say consumers these days can see past the hype and can tell quality but the coke test proves that millions just cant or chose to ignore the realities.
The world's most successful brand, Coca Cola, achieved
its longevity not through its magnificent product but
from expert marketing and branding.
While I'm clearly not comparing my writing to Coke's success, I do wonder sometimes about lesser quality product succeeding over the hyped up marketing of the likes of my mate from the Tarawera empire, Phillip MacCallister, who's marketing budget must surely be bigger than my mortgage payments, which are quite considerable!
The Share Investor Blog isn't being advertised on Google, but I probably should. I don't spend any money on marketing but I do spend time trying to get it out there for free so people can read it.
I think it is relatively interesting, and its content of a sufficiently good quality. It is getting a steady increase in readership as the months go by, but I still think it deserves better numbers when I compare it to other websites of a similar nature with larger audiences.
My ignorance of the importance of marketing before I started the Share Investor Blog is clearly apparent to me now. Here was I thinking, in my best Kevin Costner impression, "if I write it they will come".
How hopelessly wrong I was.
The importance of marketing cannot be underestimated, especially when it comes to a new business venture. While it is fine to have a wonderful product, that is not always enough. People actually have to know you have a great product.
Those people at Sony had a superior product in the Betamax Video player in the 1980s but the competition had more marketing muscle but an inferior product.
We all know what happened to Betamax.
My lesson learned!
**Footnote: Look for an exciting new permanent addition to the blog over the next 2 months. Legal reasons prevent me from telling you more.
Related Share Investor reading
Marketing Burger Fuel's Future
Pumpkin Patch vs Burger Fuel
c Share Investor 2008
AN anniversary of a war is in many ways the least useful occasion on which to take stock of something like the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, if only because any such formal observance involves the assumption that a) this is, in fact, a war and b) it is by that definition an exception from the rest of our engagement with that country and that region.
I am one of those who, for example, believes that the global conflict that began in August 1914 did not conclusively end, despite a series of fragile truces, until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This is not at all to redefine warfare and still less to contextualise it out of existence. But when I wrote the essays that go to make up A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, I was expressing an impatience with those who thought that hostilities had not really begun until George W. Bush gave a certain order in the spring of 2003.
Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy US involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein's wing of the Baath Party to power.
Not much more than a decade later, we come across persuasive evidence that the US at the very least acquiesced in the Iraqi invasion of Iran, a decision that helped inflict moral and material damage of an order to dwarf anything that has occurred in either country recently.
In between, we might note minor episodes such as Henry Kissinger's faux support to Kurdish revolutionaries, encouraging them to believe in American support and then abandoning and betraying them in the most brutal and cynical fashion.
If you can bear to keep watching this flickering newsreel, it will take you all the way up to the moment when Saddam, too, switches sides and courts Washington, being most in favour in our nation's capital at the precise moment he is engaged in a campaign of extermination in the northern provinces and retaining this same favour until the moment he decides to engulf his small Kuwaiti neighbour. In every decision taken subsequent to that, from the decision to recover Kuwait and the decision to leave Saddam in power, to the decisions to impose international sanctions on Iraq and the decision to pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, stating that long-term coexistence with Saddam's regime was neither possible nor desirable, there was a really quite high level of public participation in our foreign policy.
We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, "lied into war".
We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam or a decision to have done with him.
The President's speech to the UN on September 12, 2002, laying out the considered case that it was time to face the Iraqi tyrant, too, with this choice, was easily the best speech of his two-term tenure and by far the most misunderstood.
That speech is widely and wrongly believed to have focused on only two aspects of the problem, namely the refusal of Saddam's regime to come into compliance on the resolutions concerning weapons of mass destruction and the involvement of the Baathists with a whole nexus of nihilist and Islamist terror groups.
Baghdad's outrageous flouting of the resolutions on compliance (if not necessarily the maintenance of blatant, as opposed to latent, WMD capacity) remains a huge and easily demonstrable breach of international law. The role of Baathist Iraq in forwarding and aiding the merchants of suicide terror actually proves to be deeper and worse, on the latest professional estimate, than most people had believed or than the Bush administration had suggested.
This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself.
But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale.
A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial.
The Kurdish and Shi'ite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide.
A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled.
The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated.
Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil-free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qa'ida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society.
Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Gaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much larger than anticipated) stock of WMD, if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region's keystone dictatorship. None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty, and unintended consequences of their own.
I don't know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam's immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved.
Nonetheless, the thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadis), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?
The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur.
Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say attempt rather than do, which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on "a war of choice". But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited.
We were already deeply involved in the life and death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.
Christopher Hitchens is an author and commentator for publications such as Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly and Slate.
