If Truth be Told...

Phase One: In Search of A Bonafide Marketing Strategy
Speech by T. A. Muckabout: A Five-Year Plan

My name is Thomas A. Muckabout, the newest Manager of Marketing of IPTCo. I am here to practice despotism and nepotism, pontificate clarity of separatist idioms, especially gender; reverse discrimination, radicalize racism, and deplete division of labor. We will start our week on Sunday, all the while promote 32 hour work week and other miss-useful benefits in new global corporate America.

I will strategize, and extricate while I over sell, then intimidate and pressure workers to set unreachable production goals, let maintenance suffer, and bully the competition. Then the top management will feel pressured to hire fresh MBA’s from all over the country, who under me will strategize to pyramid the profits into bonuses for top management. Then three words for our factories: relocate; relocate; relocate. I will hire accountants to manage the factories, and project managers to run the accounting. I will recruit eager field representatives and send them out with expensive promotions that IPTCo cannot possibly fulfill.

After all that, we will go public with our funds, IPO, appear to climb quickly clinging to a repressed hope, that millions will spend millions to perpetuate our product line. After five years, I will offer my resignation, and will retire from IPTCo with a large percent of stock in my control, that I will use to leverage my position to be on the board of trustees of competing companies. The globe is ours to segment!

At some point, I will be elected to office and practice unlimited spending on programs that promote my philosophy.

Ouch!
Although it is an invitation for an exciting ride, many of us would be reluctant to ride that roller coaster; in context of the example of the forceful fictional candidate above. Many do not realize the potential for absolute corruption by those with absolute power. But, is this character a fiction? Sometimes we find out too late that fiction is not too far away: Truth is stranger than fiction.

The hazard is in loss of benefit in working in corporations run this way.

Owners of companies are desperate after their first three years of asking and begging in finding rudimentary funding, wooing, cajoling, compromising, retailing, micro managing, and not sleeping, to find trustworthy people who can put the quality where the mouth is. Yet putting the marketing into the hands of promotion geniuses may be the last thing the company ever does.

In the world of litigation and lackluster signage, the usual conventions of marketers past are letting companies and patrons down.