Baking cookies today is easy. A quick trip to the grocery store avails the choice of chocolate chip, sugar, and even peanut butter cookie dough. Take the dough home, slap it on a cookie sheet, and grandma’s creations come warm right out of the oven as soon as 8 minutes later.
I’ve never been a fan of pre-packaged, prepared cookie dough, though. I make my cookies from scratch almost every time. Nothing says homemade better than sampling raw cookie dough while it is still being mixed.
Product advertisements can seem almost as simple as pre-packaged cookie dough. You already have a brand image, and an idea of your perfect customer. All that remains is the introduction between the two. This is as pre-packaged as marketing can get in any industry.
But what about smaller offerings that have to start from scratch? Smaller companies may have a well-branded product and an understanding of their perfect customer, but they lack the experience and additional advertising resources of their larger counterparts. A friend of mine is working on publishing a book. Having never done so before, he had no idea how to promote his work or create a buzz for his book before it was printed. I doubt Penguin Books ever suffers from this problem.
My advice to him was to promote via the Internet for the time being. Web advertising and promotions can be relatively inexpensive but have far-reaching effects. I helped him set up a blog where he can market some of the material in the book and build interest. Soon, he will be building a website on a much larger-scale to serve as a virtual repository of information about the piece. The Internet is the oven in which his made-from-scratch advertising campaign can achive the same results as the pre-packaged efforts of his larger competitors.
