This will be a quick one - I just re-read the bible of modern day marketing (”Positioning” from Ries/Trout). Very recommended read for everyone who wants to build a brand (and/or a company).

One of the points which Ries/Trout makes early in the book is the fact that we live in an overcommunicated society - when the book was published (which is more than 20 years ago), the average per-capita consumption of advertising per person in the US was $200. Now put this into perspective:

Forrester predicts that online marketing expenditures in Europe will reach 16 billion EUR in 2012; with 12 billion EUR coming from the UK, France and Germany alone. Good for everyone who can get a cut of those 16 billion - bad luck if you are a small’ish startup trying to break through the noise level: Assume we have an online population of about 450 million in 2012 - this means that every person online is exposed to 35 EUR of online ad spend per year. If you would spend a whopping 1 million EUR on online marketing per year your contribution to this would be 0,00625%. Not very likely that this will help you break through the noise.

I guess it’s time to think about other ways of marketing, eh?