Nice story posted by Seth that properly executed marketing can make a difference. Excerpt:

Most marketing problems aren’t intractable. They are solved with persistence, consistency and attention to detail. When marketing doesn’t work, it’s usually because the product is lousy. But the second reason is that the organization picks too big a marketplace in comparison to the resources they have available.

If your marketing program hat has any citizen, viral or WOM component, and in this day and age it must, the size of the market that you proactively address is key. Why? Your target needs to be dense enough so that when you start drop in a little marketing uranium you create critical mass in the marketplace and get the chain reaction needed for an effective marketing program.

In Seth’s example he is talking about a relatively low budgeted effort. The concept does extend to much larger budgets. There was a time when I was spending a $90 million marketing budget. While the company has a national footprint, the money was being directed to less then 20 cities.

Why? Because it worked.

Density, not size, matters more in marketing.