Over the years I’ve heard several excuses for failed marketing.

One of my favorites is “the market is saturated.” That is supposed to mean that pretty much everyone who would need or want the product or service has heard of it or already owns it. So naturally the marketing is getting less and less effective.

But is it true?

The first time I heard this, it was for a company that had been spending more and more money on their advertising for less and less result. They had a bunch of sharp creative people in their marketing department, but for two years their ROI (return on investment) had been going down, down.

I was brought in as a consultant to try to solve it. After a fair amount of investigation I discovered the answer had been sitting on their shelf for over a year. They had a commissioned a market research study which found their potential buyers preferred to get their information online rather than through print magazines.

It was 85%, an astonishingly unanimous answer. The company had been spending more money on print ads, tweaking their ads, trying everything to get their leads generated back up to what it had been, while they were actually reaching fewer and fewer of their potential buyers.

They switched their emphasis to Internet Marketing and voila! Leads shot back up.

That’s a good example. “The market is saturated” is almost never true.