---
title: "Farewell to 'Marketing Myopia': Every Day is Double 11!"
description: "Modern marketing has evolved to Marketing 4.0, driven by values, interaction, big data, and communities, yet most companies still rely on intuition and assumptions. This article argues that many businesses suffer from 'marketing myopia,' mistaking sales channels and promotions for true marketing, and emphasizes that genuine marketing, focused on customer needs, is the key to sustainable growth."
author: "苗庆显"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2018-11-16"
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# Farewell to 'Marketing Myopia': Every Day is Double 11!

> Modern marketing has evolved to Marketing 4.0, driven by values, interaction, big data, and communities, yet most companies still rely on intuition and assumptions. This article argues that many businesses suffer from 'marketing myopia,' mistaking sales channels and promotions for true marketing, and emphasizes that genuine marketing, focused on customer needs, is the key to sustainable growth.

**Introduction:** Modern marketing concepts have evolved to Marketing 4.0, which is "value-driven, based on interaction, big data, and communities," but the vast majority of our enterprises still have an understanding of marketing that remains at the intuitive and assumptive stage.

213.5 billion yuan. This year's Double 11 on Taobao, as expected, without any suspense, naturally and inevitably broke last year's transaction record again. Teacher Ma's last Double 11 before retirement ended with a brilliant and glorious success.

Double 11 is one of Taobao's most successful marketing events. From the perspective of influencing customer behavior alone, it employs many psychological effects: for example, price anchoring, compensation psychology, and the bargain bias, but the most prominent is the herd effect.

Under the powerful information offensive of the platform, despite sluggish consumption and a downward economy, it is still easy for Double 11 to set a record. As long as it wants, it can set a record next year, and the year after that as well.

The Double 11 event, simply put, involves buyers, sellers, and the platform (in a complex sense, also including payment platforms and logistics).

Buyers are naturally those "little sheep" who are willing to "cut off hands and feet," feeling pain and pleasure simultaneously. If they don't buy something on Double 11, they always feel they've lost out. This is mainly composed of "spendthrift wives," covering all demographics, using their actual actions to refresh records and boost GDP development bubble by bubble.

The platform is naturally the "beautiful girl" with a halo, humming "make it easy to do business anywhere in the world," "holding a thin whip," "gently lashing the little sheep."

The most easily overlooked and most miserable are the hundreds of thousands of sellers participating in the event. Most of them pay platform fees, sell at prices close to or even below cost, bear logistics pressure and risks. In return, they get book sales growth, actual losses, declining customer experience, brand damage due to low prices, and long-term sales weakness after the promotion. They might want to call themselves "leeks," but customers don't agree; at the slightest dissatisfaction, they call them "unscrupulous merchants."

Old Miao's friend, Boss Z, saw a 50% increase in this year's Double 11 compared to last year. Looking at this report card, and at the young people in the e-commerce department who were cheering and had already worked overtime for many days, Boss Z was quite emotional.

The young men and women in the e-commerce department are very hardworking. They sign up for activities, modify pages, handle consultations, take orders, pack, box, ship, handle customer complaints, often working late into the night, yet still full of passion. The banners hanging in the e-commerce department and the camp beds in the corner speak volumes.

But Boss Z doesn't want to invest more in e-commerce, even though he hasn't lost money there and has tens of millions in annual sales. He knows that these sales are mostly the accumulation of his brand over the years. In trendy terms, the brand is "self-traffic," and if this "traffic" were "converted" offline, the profits would be much better. However, the sales brought by purchasing platform traffic have pitifully low long-term retention, and the money spent is frightening.

But the e-commerce manager told him that e-commerce, especially the Tmall flagship store, is already "a face" and "cannot be ignored," and big promotions like Double 11 are also "cannot be ignored."

Boss Z found such rhetoric familiar. In previous years, when selling goods in KA stores without profit, he had heard similar statements, and at that time he almost believed them.

Despite his doubts, seeing the e-commerce team's persistence and their work enthusiasm, Boss Z still allocated sufficient budget to them. At the same time, this fellow is also constantly searching for various sales channels and methods. We talked at the beginning of the year; the Toutiao system still has traffic dividends, so starting around April or May, they began "seeding" work on Toutiao and Douyin, with good results. Traffic is much cheaper, but daily sales are only a few tens of thousands of yuan, far from his expectations.

As for how to achieve sales growth next, Boss Z said: do social e-commerce, use WeChat mini-programs, embrace "new retail," and even trying Pinduoduo is possible.

Whenever they encounter growth problems, most bosses think like this Boss Z: they think about adding or changing sales channels, i.e., solving the problem of who will help sell and through what method.

But is the stagnation or decline in sales growth actually a channel problem? More often, it's a user problem. Your product cannot attract new consumers' favor, cannot resonate with young consumers; your communication with users is outdated and stale, unable to stir consumers; your image lacks beauty and personality, looking like something from grandma's generation...

These are the main reasons why most brands' sales cannot grow well. If you misdiagnose the cause and simply change channels, besides making yourself flustered and creating a lot of leftover problems, it doesn't help much.

**If you change swimming pools, those who can't swim still won't swim.**

Levitt, a marketing master comparable to Kotler, said: "**If an enterprise focuses all its energy on meeting customer needs, all other problems will be solved.**" Those enterprises that only focus on their own products and just want to sell them, those that ignore true marketing, are called by Levitt **"marketing myopia."**

Double 11 is a successful marketing activity for Taobao. It attracts a lot of attention, creates a huge square effect, and triggers massive dissemination. It has become an annual online market that consumers must attend.

But for the vast majority of sellers, they are just cannon fodder swept along, "living Lei Fengs" who "burn themselves to illuminate others." Because apart from low prices, they cannot provide real customer value through Double 11.

For the platform, Double 11 is true marketing, but for most sellers, it is just a matching or non-matching sales channel. After a carnival, there is a long period of weakness.

And being obsessed with sales methods and channels is just one manifestation of "marketing myopia."

Some are obsessed with attracting investment, focusing their marketing efforts on participating in various industry exhibitions;

Some are obsessed with their product advantages, ignoring user feelings and engaging in self-talk product displays and promotions;

Some are obsessed with advertising, hoping that advertising can smash out an industry-leading position for them;

Some are obsessed with selling goods, turning the company's marketing department into a sales support department;

Some are obsessed with self-aggrandizement, believing that their feelings can move customers as much as themselves

...

They also go to the "front line" to understand the market, and obtain "front line" information from salespeople and channel dealers, but their insight into customers is far from sufficient. They "think they are looking at customers outside the window, but in fact they are looking at a mirror—the mirror reflects their own product-oriented bias, not the actual situation of customers." (Levitt's words)

Mistaking sales for marketing, mistaking advertising for marketing, mistaking packaging for marketing, mistaking concepts for marketing, mistaking channels for marketing—true marketing is like a "stepchild," never receiving attention and often taking the blame. Many enterprises that over-packaging and over-hype are often called "over-marketing."

**There is no over-marketing, only insufficiency and impropriety. Even if an enterprise devotes all its strength to marketing, it will not be excessive.** Sixty years ago, Master Levitt's call is especially deafening in today's Chinese market.

So what is true marketing, and what is a true marketing orientation?

First, we should remember that **"an enterprise has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation." A truly effective corporate strategy must be a marketing strategy, and a truly efficient business model must be a model centered on marketing strategy. The formulation of marketing strategy must be a top leader's project.**

Marketing permeates all departments of the enterprise, not just the marketing department. Hewlett-Packard founder Packard said: "Marketing is so important that it cannot be left solely to the marketing department." All departments should maintain contact points with marketing. Marketing awareness and customer demand awareness should not only exist in the marketing department; production, supply, sales, research, human resources, and finance should all have it, and it should become their fundamental awareness.

**Marketing must be comprehensive, not only targeting customers, but also internal, supply chain, and social organizations (see figure below).**

Driven by the internet, advanced marketing concepts have evolved to Marketing 4.0, which is "value-driven, based on interaction, big data, and communities," but the vast majority of our enterprises still have an understanding of marketing that remains at the intuitive and assumptive stage, thinking about solving "transaction" and "selling goods" problems. Changing swimming pools back and forth is the norm for many enterprises, and drowning is inevitable.

Selling goods is not difficult; it is just an inevitable result after correct marketing. Farewell to "marketing myopia," and every day is Double 11.

Source: Old Miao Tears Marketing (ID: yiheyingxiao)

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