When you look at marketing from the industrial point view, the question you ask when marketing your business is:

“where is the mass?”

“How do I reach everybody with a product that is average?”

“How do we make this offering popular?”

This is when we keep score of the wrong thing.

The father of value investing, Benjamin Graham, explained the concept of voting vs. weighing concept by saying that in the short run, the market is like a voting machine, adding up which firms are popular and unpopular.

But in the long run, the market is like a weighing machine, assessing the substance of a company.

The message is clear: What matters in the long run is a company’s actual underlying business performance and not the investing public’s fickle opinion about its prospects in the short run.

Politics, entertainment, idols, big brother, social media are examples of voting machines, but your doing work that really matters is a weighing machine.

The voting machine is about being popular, about how many people who know, about who follows you on social media.

The weighing machine is about substance, about what difference and impact you are having in your community.

Today we live in an age where the mass market is dead, instead we have hundreds of micro markets where there are little markets of interests.

The voting [popular] machines is broken, what matters in the long run is the weighing [impact] machine. 

Is your event, product, service, relationship or message weighty?

Weigh more than be popular.