The argument
I spend a month on a company before I agree to work with it
Redha Alayesh is a marketing strategist in Riyadh. He spends a month, and 100 to 150 hours, on a company before agreeing to work with it. This is the argument for why.
There are too many marketers to trust any of them. That is the objection I hear most often in Riyadh, and the founder saying it is usually right.
He has been sold 12 social media posts a month, a content plan, and a monthly report with impressions on it, by a company that calls itself a marketing agency. He bought it because he had no way of knowing what a marketing agency is supposed to produce. It did not bring him a single customer, and it did not make an existing customer pay more, which are the only two things marketing is for.
So he is left holding a question he cannot answer before the money moves: which of these people can actually do the job?
He cannot check it. Every marketer in the room says the same sentences. Case studies are chosen by the seller. References are chosen by the seller. Awards are given for craft, and craft is not the thing he is buying.
There is exactly one claim a buyer can test in the room, in real time, before he pays: whether you understand his business better than he does. That is why I spend a month on a company before I agree to work with it. Between 100 and 150 hours of reading, looking, and talking to people. When I was starting out, none of it was paid.
What is all that reading actually for?
What you are looking for is already public. The reason nobody has used it is that nobody read far enough.
Three men are worth the detour, because the pattern is identical in all three and none of them was doing anything clever. All three were reading something boring.
Claude Hopkins was asked to sell Pepsodent and turned it down at first, because toothpaste had beaten better men than him. When he took it, he did not start with the toothpaste. He sat down with a stack of dental textbooks and read until he found a passing reference to the mucin plaques that form on teeth. He called them the film. The campaign was one instruction: run your tongue across your teeth, feel the film, get rid of it. He built a global product out of an obscure sentence in a dental textbook, and he tells it on himself in My Life in Advertising.
David Ogilvy spent 3 weeks reading when his agency won the Rolls-Royce account: technical manuals, engineering documents, motoring journals. The headline everybody quotes, the one about the loudest noise at 60 miles an hour coming from the electric clock, was not his sentence. He found it buried in a British motoring journal and lifted it. His contribution was reading far enough to reach it.
Warren Buffett, on how he used to find companies: "I took those manuals and went through each one of them page by page. All 10,000 pages."
In all three cases the fact that made the difference was sitting in public, priced at zero. The only scarce input was somebody willing to read to the end.
What does a month of analysis actually look like?
The month is mostly reading, and what separates it from everyone else's research is how far down it goes. When a company is in front of me, I do not open Google, search two keywords, read the first two results and call that market research. That is what makes the report worthless.
I go 10 pages deep. 10 results a page, so 100 to 200 results, and then the articles and the podcasts and the interviews behind them. I read what the company has published and what has been published about it. I talk to its customers. Customer interviews, customer research, market research: these are three names for the same work, and the work is reading and listening until the market stops surprising you.
Not the extra mile. The extra marathon.
What comes out at the end is not a document. It is that you can name the channels that will produce a result for this specific company, say what it should be saying in them, and give the reason for both. That is a marketer's job: to multiply the effect of everything the company already does to sell, online and offline. You cannot multiply what you have not bothered to understand.
I have worked with 40+ marketing departments, and the month has come before all of the ones worth having.
What if you do the work and lose the contract?
This is the objection every marketer and every agency owner raises when I describe the month, and it is the only part worth arguing about.
The first answer is that the month is what wins the contract. You arrive in a room where the other bidders are describing themselves, and you describe the buyer's own market back to him with detail he did not have. That conversation does not end in a comparison of day rates.
The second answer is the one people miss. The research does not belong to the deal. It belongs to the sector. A month spent on one company teaches you the market that company sits in: the same customers, the same buying cycle, the same five competitors, the same channels that work and the same channels everyone wastes money on. Lose the contract and you still own all of it.
Which means you can do it deliberately, in the other order. Pick the sector first. Do the month. Then go to the top 10 companies in it and open with what you already know about their market and about them specifically. You are not asking them for a discovery call. You are arriving with the discovery already done.
Calling that free work is the short-sighted reading. It is the cheapest way anyone has ever bought a sector.
The month also does not stay unpaid. It was free when I had nothing to show and no reason for anyone to believe me. Later it was discounted. Now it can carry a premium of its own, because the analysis turned out to be the part worth buying. The free version is what earned the right to charge for it.
Why is depth the strategy if you have no natural talent?
I am not a world-class marketer. It is a goal, not a description, and I have specific deficiencies that make the usual route unavailable to me: creativity in the visual sense, colour, taste. I am not the person who will out-design anyone.
Depth is the one advantage that does not require talent. It requires hours, and hours are available to everybody who is willing to be bored for a month. That is the entire trade.
You can test how uncontested that advantage is without leaving your own office. A manager gives an employee a book and asks them to read it by next month. It usually does not get read, and usually nothing happens about it. The instruction was explicit, the book was free, and the time existed. The barrier is boredom, and nobody is checking.
It is also the reason I have been in rooms I had no other way into. People who are genuinely world-class in their fields. Top 10 companies in a sector, some with revenue in the hundreds of millions, occasionally billions. I am not in those rooms because I am the most talented marketer available. I am there because I did the reading.
There are hundreds of thousands of marketers. Almost none of them have done the month.