Who is this Stunna guy, and why should we listen to him? Stunna has a real name, Dan. Dan has a bachelors degree in Marketing and runs two successful companies. Dan has spent over $80,000 in marketing coaching programs, courses, seminars, books, cds, dvds and consulting over and above his college education. Dan knows Marketing.

So I have struggled with getting involved and sharing my knowledge with CF for a long while now. First of all, for me to post some of the things I think can help CF takes up a lot of my time, and my time (like yours) is very valuable. However I have been slowly watching the playerbase dwindle, and seen some valiant but not terribly great marketing attempts fail to bring replacements. I love CF, and have loved it for 10 years. I don’t want to see it crumble into nothing, and frankly if we don’t recruit some newbies soon we’ll lose the ability to do that. So I’m going to put up a series of posts, as I have time, that deals with the subject of marketing as it pertains to CF.

We are going to begin with the biggest, most awesome, most crucial and most overlooked rule of marketing first. Message, Market, Media.

Market: Who plays CF? More to the point, who do we want to play CF?

Message: What message do you want to deliver to our market? Why is CF fun? Why is it better to spend your time playing CF than doing needlepoint? What do our prospective newbies need to understand in order to see the value?

Media: With the first two elements, Market and Message, firmly in place, we can focus on finding the correct media with which to reach them.

CF and most businesses totally mess this up. Everyone is sitting around brainstorming about marketing, wondering what they can do to bring in the new prospects. Along comes an idea (like TMS etc.) and away we go, throwing our resources into a Media without any thought to Market and Message. There is no clearly defined person we are trying to reach, no finely crafted Message we are trying to give them. We skip the two most important steps!

In the span of a couple hours you make the mistake most marketers make. This explains why so many people get discouraged and say, “There is no good way to market CF.”

This very simple formula must be followed exactly as I’m laying it out. Misfire on one of these cylinders, and your marketing is going to be a total waste.

Now in the three subsequent posts lets try to define what our message, market and media is.