Marketing Advisors In Malaysia Will Avoid You If They Smell These Red Flags
Let me say this first. Not all money is good money. I found this lesson the hard way. These particular customers somehow drain all the sanity left in your team. As a marketing advisor, I’ve not only watched but also experienced the same train wreck play out across the Malaysian market over and over again. If you are a CEO and your company operates like this, you are the absolute worst type of customer to deal with. Many marketing advisors and agencies will avoid you completely.
Here are the red flags, FYI.
You are desperate for immediate results. Did you know that marketing is a compound game and a mid-to-long-term growth engine? Marketing is not something that you use on Monday and double your revenue next week. Marketing won’t work under pressure. Desperation will force the execution to rely on cheap hacks. You panic, burn through ad spend, and scrap the entire plan in two weeks before it gains traction. Desperation destroys strategy every single time.
You expect marketing to save your already-doomed business. If your product sucks, your operations are broken, or your business model is a dinosaur, marketing will not save you. As a matter of fact, marketing will accelerate your demise because it exposes your flaws to a wider audience.
You don’t have a budget for marketing. You keep saying that the budget is the bare minimum to invest, but you want millions of dollars in new projects. This statement itself showcases your mentality. Only losers like you see marketing as a cost centre.
You pay for a marketing strategy, but have zero execution. It’s because there’s no marketing team member in sight. There is nothing more frustrating than spending 6 weeks crafting a sharp strategy, but still nothing happens. Zero execution. Everything is still on paper. Why? That’s because you don’t have anyone to execute. You have people in other departments but none in marketing. Even if you have a team in the marketing department, those are seconded from other departments.
Your clueless boss hijacks expert strategy with his random opinions. You pay an advisor top-tier rates for expertise, only to let the VP with zero marketing experience overrule the strategy based on his personal instincts and logic. Instead of trusting the expert and giving the authority for the strategy to be translated into real work, you let the VP’s random instructions rewrite the roadmap until it becomes a complete mess. You are just a waste of time.
Sounds familiar? Unless you start to respect the time spent and the strategy built, you are just going to waste your money and everyone else’s time.
Marketing Strategy DIY
Perhaps you do not need a continuous marketing advisory session every month. Get the right framework or template, get the brief on how to use it, and execute.
