"If your goal is to create killer campaigns on a budget, PyroMarketing is a good guide." --Rich Karlgaard, Forbes

Got two and a half minutes? Learn more about PyroMarketing by watching this fast, fun, and informative video from Creo Productions www.creoproductions.com.

The era of mass marketing is ending. The promotion of a single product or service to everyone through undifferentiated media reached its peak in the 1960's and its success convinced most marketers it was the only way. But marketing systems don't exist in isolation. They are one component in a stew of societal influences and whether or not they work depends on that context. Mass marketing dominated the last century because for most of the last century society was perfectly optimized to enable its success. But the circumstances that enabled mass marketing --limited product choice, clustered consumers, broad media availability but limited choice, and low consumer resistance to advertising--have been replaced by their polar opposites and these new circumstances demand a new approach.

I believe the best way to understand the marketing process, the way messages are sent, received, acted upon, and spread, is to think of it as fire. I explain the process in PyroMarketing: The Four-Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life.

PyroMarketing is a new way to think about marketing—one that acknowledges and accommodates human nature and society’s new realities. But more importantly, it takes the mystery out of word-of-mouth by reducing it to a systematic approach anyone can follow. PyroMarketing involves four simple steps:

Imagine that you are lost in the freezing wilderness (the marketplace), must start a fire to survive (actual sales of your product or service), and that you have only one match (the finite nature of your marketing resources). You may get only one shot at building your fire. So make it count.

PyroMarketing involves four simple, but effective steps.

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1. Gather the driest tinder: Focus your promotions on those people most likely to buy, benefit from, and then enthusiastically endorse your product or service. They are the only ones whose ignition temperature is within reach of your advertising. They light easily and burn hot. The driest tinder is where word-of-mouth wild fires begin.
2. Touch it with the match: To the extent you can, give people an experience with your product or service. If you want people to laugh, don’t tell them you’re funny, tell them a joke. Experience is the shortcut to product understanding. It touches people deeply and generates more heat than advertising, igniting even the mildly interested.
3. Fan the flames: Fanning the flames means giving people tools to help them spread your message throughout their social network. People spread messages more effectively than advertising. The fire is hotter than the match. This is why the process that spreads your marketing message must be different than the one by which it began. Leveraging the power of personal influence is the only way to expand your marketing fire beyond its point of origin (the driest tinder and mildly interested) to the masses. By understanding the process you can equip people with tools to exponentially increase their reach and influence.
4. Save the Coals: Saving the coals means keeping a record of the people you encounter through your marketing so you can quickly and easily reach them to fan the flames or to tell them about new products that match their interests. This allows your marketing to build equity and keep pace with the needs of your growing business.