Smart Marketing - Understand the Hollywood Principle

Growth hacking has taught Marketing the importance of Applied Software Engineering. Growth Marketing practitioners should understand how consumers think. Consumers apply the Hollywood Principle: "Don't call us, we'll call you". The Consumer should be calling the Producer instead of the reverse. This inversion of control mechanism would, in my opinion, benefit the marketing mix: Products will deliver exactly what customers are demanding. Price will be transparent and commensurate to the offered value. Placement of the product will be dictated by the buyer interest and profitable customer retention analysis, rather than artificially and temporarily apparent customer demand. Promotion of the product will be achieved by free subscription to relevant material rather than expensive ads, and more educated clients will look into comparison matrices emerged from a community rather than paid artificially generated benchmarks.

The Hollywood Principle brings to software development two important benefits: Decoupling, which is needed to make sure code can be tested in isolation; and Cohesion, which is needed to make sure software is packaged together to work towards a very specific goal.

This principle also brings to the customer two important benefits: Decoupling, which is needed to avoid locking into sub-par services as the priority becomes a match on prioritized needed features rather than existing relationships; and Cohesion, which is needed to make sure consumed services offer highly specialized value rather than a one size fits all requirements.

Traditional marketing is still predominant: pushy follow ups on cold email campaigns, pushy follow ups on consumption of published content, pushy ads that do not let you navigate through clean content, pushy commercials that disrupt your productivity ...

We all want our services to be bought but pushing at the wrong time has an adverse effect. Pulling is safer. Instead of overwhelming the potential future customers with unnecessary calls, emails and ads; marketers should keep the good job of publishing meaningful content that educates and makes the customer ultimately decide for the best.

Marketing should be modernized and respect the modern knowledge user. Do not call the customer, let the customer call you later when your service is of interest. Offer your potential and existing customers a valuable newsletter/podcast/videocast without fluff but just stuff, make your website rich in content that educates on the possibilities of your services, showcase previous successful client engagements, make all content short and educative. Everybody wants free lunch, which we know it does not exist, but we should know when is the right time to charge for it.

Here is a simple recipe:

1. Create relevant content in different media (some prefer video, others audio, others written information)
2. Allow to subscribe to such content and explain clearly who and how to reach out for further questions and suggestions
3. Listen to feedback, measure impact and segment the audience to determine what relevant content should be created next

Here are examples of pushy marketing that has not worked for me and probably it is not working for most because it does not respect the Hollywood Principle: