Dave Trott’s Blog: Marketing Begins with the Market

“Tony Spong just sent me an excerpt from a book he read on holiday. A cookbook. But one with a difference, an anti-recipe cookbook. Written by the Italian chef Marcella Hazan, it’s about how most people get it wrong. They study recipes. Then they slavishly recreate those recipes. And they wonder why their food never tastes as good. They followed absolutely everything in the book down to the letter. Just like a chemical formula in a laboratory. But cooking is not like recreating a chemical formula in a laboratory. It isn’t about tubes of consistent chemicals.   And Tony was struck by the similarity between this and what we do. How a lot of marketers are just like those cooks who slavishly follow recipes. Trying to duplicate formulas and case histories. They can’t allow for the fact that people vary, circumstances vary, brands vary, times, seasons, tastes, finances, moods vary. Recipes, like case histories, should be a guide, not a strait jacket. As Marcella Hazan says “One must bear in mind that a recipe is only the congealed record of a once fluid and spontaneous act. It is this spontaneity that the good cook must recover. To attempt to reproduce any dish, time after time, through plodding duplication of a recipe’s every step, is futile and tedious, like memorizing a ditty in some foreign tongue.” More>>>