The myth of marketing costs

No, I don’t mean that marketing is bad or that it doesn’t exist or that you shouldn’t pay for it.  Good marketing is a very valuable tool.

However, when you say, “I have to charge this much for my product to cover marketing costs”, you are doing it wrong.  If you aren’t making back the money spent on marketing in extra profits, you should find someone else to do your marketing, or stop doing it altogether.

If you spend $10 on marketing, your profits (not your total sales) should increase by at least $11.  Otherwise you were better off to just keep your $10.

So what “I have to charge this much for my product to cover marketing costs” really means is “I am charging you more so I can make more money”.  Good work if you can get it, but you’d better make sure your customers never find out what’s going on.  They aren’t likely to be happy about it.

See part 1

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 7:17 am and is filed under Book sales, Everyone is Wrong, Marketing, Pricing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.