Because we tend to place marketing priorities on the back burner when things are busy, the game of catch-up puts us in a position of expecting too much, too quickly when we finally get around to implementing our marketing plans. You have heard the age-old expression that Rome was not built in a day. This expression applies very much to your marketing actions.

Goals are achieved one step at a time. The goals of marketing plans are no exception. The game of catch-up is not congruent with the need to be consistent. Too many times we have abandoned our marketing activities because we have witnessed no immediate gratification.

This is not to say that there are not ways to make every marketing activity more effective in the short term. There are marketing actions aimed at developing name identification and there is no reason why these actions can’t elicit a response as well as building name identification and reaching other worthy goals such as credibility.

The goal of constantly evaluating marketing actions so that they can be altered for increased effectiveness is certainly not incongruent with the goal of achieving consistency. We typically abandon our marketing actions to add completely different activities because we don’t have the resources to keep more than one or two going at once.

All marketing activities can be effective with the correct timing, message, and delivery mechanism. No marketing activity can be effective if we do not stick with it in the long run.