Marketing & what???  Let’s see if I can make that headline make some sense.  I must forewarn you, this is the unedited version I wrote out while traveling back from Russia crossing 9 time zones, sitting on planes for 15 hours and going on day 7 of almost no sleep.

Ellie happily eating her porridge

My wife Lisa & I recently adopted 18 month old Ellie from Russia.  Prior to our trip to go before the Russian court, our adoption agency sent us an email saying the judge would probably ask Lisa if she knew how to make Russian porridge and included the recipe.

Porridge is a staple in the children’s diets in the orphanages and they want you to continue feeding it to them after you bring them home, then gradually introduce American foods into their diet.  This helps reduce the shock to their systems.

OK – so here’s the tie-in to marketing (at least my attempt at it).

You have a marketing strategy that has been your staple and it has worked fairly well for you.  Then you read an article or blog and it gave you a great idea for a new marketing strategy you’d like to add to your marketing toolbox.

You shouldn’t  immediately abandon what you’ve been doing and replace it with this new strategy.  It may be a shock to your (marketing) system.

Instead, you want to gradually incorporate the new idea into your marketing mix while testing it as you go.  Then, if it performs better than what you’ve been doing you can either continue with both or phase out your old methods in favor of this new, tastier fare.

(If this made no sense, I blame jet lag & anyway it gave me an excuse to post a picture of cute little Ellie).