Many Pebbles or One Rock
by Greg Shelton
Suppose you are a young man exploring an abandoned industrial park with several of your friends. You are walking along, looking in old buildings and arguing whether a Don Mattingly/Carlton Fisk combo is a fair trade for one Darryl Strawberry card. Then, you come upon a large, empty warehouse with several window panes. Some are already cracked and broken. Others are perfectly intact.
It doesn’t take long before one of your friends grabs a rock and hurls it toward one of the windows. He successfully shatters one of the perfectly intact panes, and now the act of breaking the windows is a matter of honor; a test of manliness if you will.
So, you reach down and grab a fistful of pebbles. You steady yourself, take a deep breath and heave your fistful of mayhem into the air. Your friends begin to chuckle as your multi-pronged assault bounces timidly off the window panes with “pings” and “pangs.” Your best friend, the one who began the melee, comfortingly pats you on the back and says, “The best way to break ‘em is to use one big rock, not a bunch of little ones.”
This metaphor represents a common mistake many American businesses make when executing a marketing plan. Most companies struggle to achieve market penetration or growth targets because they employ an undisciplined message about their products/services. Rather than pulling their sales, marketing, advertising, public relations and human resources together as a unified go-to-market machine, they treat these interrelated functions as unrelated cogs. In order to achieve optimal return on a sales/marketing investment, a firm must operate at peak efficiency in communicating the what, why, when and where of their products/services. This efficiency of communication can only be achieved when the aforementioned functions are working together toward the same end, in the same way and with the same rewards.
Until American businesses are willing to acknowledge and embrace the inherent efficiencies of this go-to-market model, they will continue to fumble their way through the new world economy and concede position as global business leaders.
Image Source: Mr Thinktank
