Ok.

My last blog, before I decided to blog under my own name, was called Unstupid Marketing.

And here's something that's a little stupid.

Something that got my gullet a little steamed up.

I read something yesterday about "how the rules of marketing have changed."

The "old marketing mix" from the sixties (price, product, promotion, place... and later positioning)... was dead, and that in this day and age we should heed the "new" ones instead.

I don't remember what they were. Something like "People, Personal, Purpose, Perception."

It never ceases to amaze me how many of these new "social media" type people keep trying to make up new rules. Proclaim things dead. And... so on.

The only thing you need to know about marketing: sell something people want to buy, and do it so well so they want to come back and do it again and again and then go tell all their friends about it.

Or something like that. All the big marketing success stories ever, they happened like that.

The point is, nothing ever changes in marketing. All the fundamentals have remained the same since the first caveman traded some animal skins to get a cave with a better view. (to borrow from John Carlton)

These new people say things like "it's not about what you sell, it's the people you serve."

Well. Duh. That's not new. Direct marketers figured that out a hundred years ago. OF COURSE you should build relationships and connect with people and actually give a shit. OF COURSE you shouldn't take their money and run. Whether you're on the "let's heal the world and sing kumbaya" side of the scale, or you're a cold-hearted greedy bastard who only cares about money... the simple math tells you that you will go out of business if you don't cultivate good relationships with customers. Social media didn't change that, btw.

Now that doesn't mean people aren't still stupid and try to make their marketing about their product... but don't try to tell me YOU came up with that.

The reason why people buy things, and the mechanisms that makes us like someone and want to buy from them again and again, and how relationships between people are formed, and all these other things... none of it is new.

The rules of marketing will change when something very fundamental changes in human nature. When our DNA strands get rewired.

New technology, like internet access, doesn't change anything. Yep, it makes it easier to connect and build relationships. That's amazing.

But the fundamentals of salesmanship don't change, period.

Most of the consultants and... especially social media consultants... are entirely full of shit. They don't know it. They're genuinely full of it. And yeah, some of them can still get results. But here's a dirty secret: the things they do that actually work, they learnt from people like me. Direct marketers. Probably the old school guys who self-published info products and sold them via mail order in the sixties and seventies and eighties.

If you want to learn how to sell, go read Claude Hopkins, John Caples and David Ogilvy. Then go study Gary Halbert and Dan Kennedy and John Carlton.

And if you want the tactical stuff, here are my four Ps of marketing:

• Positioning is everything
• PStorytelling drives everything
• PMake great offers that people can't say no to
• PYour biggest asset will always be your best customers, spend most of your marketing power cultivating them and marketing to them
• PKeep doing all those things consistently

Oops, I guess that was five Ps.

Ok, now relax. Rant is over. Long time since I got a good one out of me. I'm not going to edit any of this to preserve the raw-ness. And because it's saturday.

Have a great weekend.