Category: marketing

Mindless

FabrizioLeave a comment

A father buys a package of snacks and sees a funny promotion printed on the cardboard.

“Give your child a superhero adventure!”

What they want:

  • Spend a few carefree minutes bonding with their child.

What they don’t want:

  • Fill in a form asking for their gender, email address, telephone number, home address, and a few other personal information.
  • Give consent for sharing data with third-parties and receive further marketing material.
  • Be pressured into a meaningless deadline (two months from the current time) by which they need to submit their child picture. Or else … ?
  • Realize that “giving their child a superhero adventure” actually means having their child’s picture mindlessly inserted into a soulless cartoon frame.
  • Be informed that the final deliverable (the soulless cartoon frame) will be available within 15 working days.
  • Get to know that they can check the status of the deliverable by logging into their personal area (what personal area?).
  • Be given a 8-digit code that identifies the deliverable.
  • Get all the information from a very sketchy sender (fornimascheremarvel23.kinder.com).
  • Receive a link to download the deliverable from their personal area (?) 24 hours later, when they (and their children) have already moved on to other things.

Guess what they get?

Distinction

FabrizioLeave a comment

There are two ways to build awareness.

One is top down. It’s about putting your face (your logo) in as many places as possible. It’s about press releases, awards, events, ads. It takes money.

One is bottom up. It’s about engaging with a niche audience wherever they are. It’s about commenting, posting, liking, and sharing common experiences. It takes time.

It’s an important distinction, because the tactics and resources that refer to one strategy cannot be employed for the other.

It’s an important distinction, because most don’t understand it.

Cold

FabrizioLeave a comment

“Hi, this is me from my company. I understand you are using my competitor.”

“Correct. Now is not a good time, could you drop me an email?”

“Sure. I understand you are using my competitor, would you be interested in evaluating my company at renewal.”

“Sorry, it really is not a good time. Could you send an email?”

“Would you be interested in evaluating my company.”

“I keep saying it’s not a good time. Send me an email.”

I understand there’s a script to follow, some boxes to check, a grumpy supervisor. But if this is the job, then sure, AI will take it.

Human matter

FabrizioLeave a comment

We have made marketing a commodity. We have made it about scale, repetition, numbers, algorithms. We have made it a matter of point-to-point measurement and one-way funnel.

And now we worry that a machine can take our job?

AI will replace you if you think that marketing is a “if this then that” statement, if you look at a blog post only in terms of keyword density, if you consider an ICP something to bend at your own need.

For all the others, we still very much need you.

It’s not the rise of the robots that frightens me.

It’s the rise of all those corporatists who have forgotten that humans matter.

George Tannenbaum, Rising. Falling. Choosing.

The prepared marketer

FabrizioLeave a comment

Of course, this is triggering for every marketer.

But the reality is that those sentences will continue to be spoken in companies everywhere. And the only remedy to this simple truth, is to be prepared. To have a plan, to have a reputation, to have leverage. Because it is always true that one of the main task of every marketer is to market marketing.