How marketers can use dating experience to get ahead in life

When we were in business school, after the second year, students were required to take an option or major in marketing, accounting or other specialisations. There was a joke that if one had never dated, specialising in marketing would be a bad idea.

A friend took this thinking further when he was searching for a job in a media house. Fresh from college, he was asked to give evidence of his practical experience in marketing and told the interview panel he had never failed to get a girlfriend. He was hired.

Another fact is that marketing men were perceived to be so notorious in dating that there was a classic article in the Harvard Business Review about it. The article published many decades ago was titled, Would you marry your daughter to a marketing man? The fathers were being warned of the characters of the marketing men of those days.

The high social skills associated with marketing and the travelling salesmen were probably exaggerated in those early days. If the article was to be rewritten today, it would probably mention something to do with marketing girls. Like marketing and economics, dating is about deploying scarce resources.

There is a saying that all the good men are taken and a movie by the title, A Few Good Men. The good men and good women may be scarce, too, and that is where the economics may come in.

I read a book written by two male psychologists where they suggest that actually there are more good girls in the world than good men. The book suggests that a single girl needs to look beyond her checklist of tall, dark, handsome and “loaded” to find a good man.

You know that diamond in the rough theory. The book is titled, Why Smart Women Make Foolish Choices. It explains why the bad boy and the married man are always oversubscribed in the dating scene and why they shouldn’t be.

It seems to agree with emerging marketing knowledge which suggests that consumers don’t have perfect information about brands. As a result, when making purchase decisions, consumers are lazy in their evaluation and they result to choosing what others use as social proof or guarantee.

Marketing Ps

During an experiential marketing conference organised by Marketing Africa in the recent past, one speaker talked about how there are now more than 40 Ps of marketing. The fact is that the many Ps apply to dating.

The product is you, like my friend said in the interview and, therefore, personal branding is important. Price is also a significant P, which is well explored by a book, Dollars and Sex: How The Economy Influences Sex and Love, that offers a few ideas on how you can apply economics to dating.

The book offers refreshing economic ideas that can help to improve your relationships especially if you are single. In a recent radio talk show, men called in to confess they have been paid varying amount by women they have dated.

The economic tip here is best practised by government. When the President Uhuru Kenyatta was Finance minister, he created a stimulus package. The message here is that spending is the best way to get out of a recession both in the economy or dating. This shows your prospects that you are willing to invest in a relationship.

The other P is Place which is more about distribution and market presence. Long absence from the dating market makes your prospects to doubt your value. The dollars book suggests that one should avoid a thin market by being open to dates with people from broad and different backgrounds.

One should also hang out in the right places and with the right people (another P) to attract the right targets.

The writer is the marketing director of SBO Research. E-mail: [email protected], Twitter @bngahu.