ALL EMPLOYEES ARE MARKETERS This is exactly why Peter Drucker said that the purpose of a company is to get a customer. Whether you have your own in-house marketing department, outsource your marketing to external agencies, or you do it yourself, getting your message into the market place and reaching your prospective target customer is a constant challenge for all companies. Equally the cost of getting a new customer to come to you can be painfully expensive. Many companies approach this scientifically and use terminology such as cost per lead, or cost per acquisition. They know precisely how much they need to spend on marketing to acquire a customer. A perfect example of this, which was relayed to me recently, is the National Geographic magazine which works on a subscription model, and apparently pays up to £50 to acquire a new customer. That means through their mixed marketing campaigns of newspaper advertising, magazine advertising, direct mail letters and online advertising, their average cost to acquire a new 12-month subscriber is £50. Let's say that the subscription revenue for 12 months is only £29, you can see that it takes around 2 years of subscriptions to recover the cost of acquiring that customer. The same model is true with credit cards. You will have seen how companies try to entice you with 6-months interest free balance transfers from your old credit card, 0% interest for 12-months on new purchases, and a myriad of other offers to get you to move your business to them as a customer. 18