Executive Cleaning Decisions – Doing Less Marketing

I spent most of the day today cleaning up the place, in particular, the nightmare that is my home office. I think its more precise to describe it as my home “storage locker” as it seems to have degenerated into a semi-intelligent live mass that inhibits one of the rooms along with cables, media and mail – constantly moving, shifting and repositioning in the most perfect way to eliminate any chance of actually finding anything in it.

Today I decided I would go through the mess, brave the mess, and clean it all up. I came to a single conclusion:

We do way too much marketing.

Not we as in OWN, but we as in IT people. I’ve easilly scraped off at least $10–15,000 in swag and marketing off my beta bench alone. Not to mention the closet, the floors, the bookshelves. My god. It was everywhere. Media. USB connectors. SWAG. More backpacks than Noah could have used to transport all the animals. Tshirts. Stuff that looked like a software box but was a tshirt. Flyers. Flyers. Computer gadgets. Portfolios.

I think I’ve decided, today, on my own…. to do away with physical marketing. Remember, this is my home office. This is actually the little tiny percentage of crap I actually thought was interesting. I probably threw away 10x as much. And I bet you everyone is exactly the same, so it doesn’t make sense to blow money on things that will just be discarded. Why buy marketing collateral if people won’t pay attention to it. Might as well invest in some airline stocks

This came at a rather good time, just when we’re gearing up to update our semi-annual maketing and partner guide. That sucker is gonna be 100% electronic, at least based on the junk I threw out today.