Marketing Matters

I'm sitting in a chair on my driveway with all my junk around me. I'm having a garage sale before I move to try and reduce the amount of crap I need to move. It's scheduled from 8:00 to 12:00. It's 8:45 and I have not had a single customer. All is quite on the garage sale front. I think I am going to learn a hard lession in marketing today. I'm an engineer, so by nature I am more interested in getting the job done than trying to sell it. At work I work all day to make the perfect product. In the past I am sure I thought that if you make a good enough product then people will come and buy it... because it's a good product. I am starting to see that making a good product is only half of the work and that marketing IS VERY IMPORTANT. For this garage sale I worked hard cleaning my house, finding things to sell, but the marketing was an afterthought. With a few days to go I figured I should make a few signs. I posted on a few local message boards about it too. What I forgot until the day before was that since Monday was a holiday in Canada, garbage day is pushed back one day to Saturday morning... right when I wanted to have my garage sale. I figure no one wants to walk past loads of garbage to get to my stuff, so I changed it at the last minute to Sunday. Luckily I forgot to put the day on my signs so I could change them easily, but my two message board postings were now wrong. I corrected one, but ran out of time to fix the other one. I didn't post my signs in the neighborhood until 5PM the night before. Looking back, I did a real crappy job marketing this garage sale and I am paying for it now. If no one comes then I all I did was waste my time dragging all my crap onto my driveway and now I have to drag it back in a few hours and STILL have to move it to my new house. For some reason I never seem to give marketing the respect it deserves. Hopefully today will make me see the light. Marketing matters!

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