April 7, 1969, is the day that many consider the birthday of the internet. That is when a government agency of the U.S. Department of Defense known as ARPA awarded a contract to BBN Technologies to develop a way for remote computers to connect and share information with each other. By October of that year they had developed a crude internet that linked two computers - one at UCLA and one at Stanford University - and the simple message "Login” was sent from one to the other. The technology continued to develop, but was never marketed for everyday use by regular consumers. That was 21 years before Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web that allowed for the sharing of information for everyone with a computer and a connection. We are sitting here 53 years later and it seems illogical to sit on a revolutionary idea as big as the internet for that long. Why did it take so long to become a big thing? Because no one marketed it for common use.

New ideas are thought of all the time. Very few of them come to market. Why? There are generally two reasons: development is time consuming and costly, and no one marketed the new idea. Since this is a marketing blog, let me tackle that second reason. Nothing sells without marketing. Your marketing is the way you make consumers aware of your brand, help them understand exactly what you are selling, how it would make their life easier, and will give them a compelling reason to give it a try. Without it, you may have the greatest idea in the world, but no one will know. It is like a birthday gift that was never unwrapped. When marketing is working correctly, it unwraps the gift, holds it up so everyone can see it and says, "Wouldn’t you like one of these?”

Another reason new ideas are sometimes not marketed is because of lack of vision. The technology is there, but not the vision to see how consumers would desire it. Think back to the 1970s when the internet was being refined to allow university and government computers to communicate with each other. Why didn’t the internet come to the consumer market two decades earlier when it was first developed? No one thought it would sell so they did not market it. Think about the way world history would have been changed if the internet had been widely used from the 1970s forward! In 1970, phones were hardwired and many people still shared a phone line with their neighbors (something called a party line.) Television reception was conducted by airwaves and antennas. If you wanted information, you had to drive to a library to find it in a book. Maps were printed on paper and sold in gas stations. Cashiers at a retail store actually typed in the price of the items you were buying on a cash register instead of scanning them. Inventory was kept by physically counting items. If the vision for how big the internet could be had been there from its birth in 1969, and it would have been marketed, how different would our world be today?

If you have something new and you have developed it to the point where it is ready to be sold, make sure you are marketing it. Get the word out. Don’t leave the present wrapped for a couple of decades before someone else discovers its value. Make sure the marketing is working for you.