If you play on trite stereotypes, and execute poorly, marketing can easily backfire.
When you take it off the road, on the other hand, you can have fun with it and entertain people.
It’s mainly a matter of personality.
Tag: fail
Lost and never found
A while back, I was asked to express the importance of taking a more customer-centric approach in messaging our product.
The best thing I could think of was a slide with these.
Seamless and secure collaboration.
Simple upgrades at no charge.
Connecting data from across the business.
Automated business workflows.
Cloud accelerated ECM.
Security and compliance for all industries.
Secure access to complete information.
Enrich content and gain valuable insights by leveraging artificial intelligence.
Seamlessly navigate the entire process in one place.
Use groups feature to create and manage lists of members.
Rapid automation of manual, repetitive processes.
Digitize and organize business critical information.
People did not immediately understand what I meant, until I mentioned that none of these claims was from our marketing. They could have easily been, but they were actually taken from competitors, alternatives and (some) from generic Saas companies.
Now, imagine you are a customer and you start surfing around for a solution. Imagine how lost you would be by stumbling on this type of messages, and by trying to figure out which product is best for you. And by the way, no. The situation does not improve with more granular and detailed content you can find in the body of the webpage or in other collaterals.
Everybody can say they can do more or less great and amazing things. But very few manage to meaningfully connect to their audience.
If you stop at what the next time you write copy for your product, expect a result similar to the above.
Never a good idea
It’s never a good idea to decide what’s better for the customer, for example by defaulting your new application to “launch on start”.
Even if that would supposedly improve their experience.
Particularly if you are in the business of making their digital life safer and more controlled.
The emperor has no clothes
A good portion of traffic on the internet is made up.
Voice search optimization is not as important as we thought it was.
The importance of videos for marketing has been inflated.
In the first three months of 2019, Facebook has removed nearly as many fake accounts as there are real ones (2.2 billion to be precise).
The story of cheap and easy, of “anybody can do it”, of the death of traditional marketing, of of infinite reach and segmentation is cracking on multiple sides.
We have been fed an illusion, an utopia, and we believed it because it was a shortcut.
It’s beyond time to point the finger and wake the masses of marketers up by simply stating the obvious. The emperor has no clothes.
Interests
No company intentionally goes against its interests, the so called shareholders value.
Some companies, though, pursue shareholders value in the long term. And not surprisingly, by doing so, they also manage to more positively contribute to the communities they operate in.
Other companies, instead, pursue shareholders value in the short term. And when doing that, it’s very challenging to also juggle the interests of people that happen to live where the company carries out its business.
A good example of the first type of company is Mars. In 2009, 2013, and 2016, Mars has interpreted a raising trend and has shrinked the size of their snacks, so that they could be consumed while still meeting general guidelines for the assumption of sugars. They have also doubled down on the effort by challenging some high level partnerships and campaigning to reduce weekly consumption of their products.
A good example of the second type of company is Facebook. Despite having been asked to take action for the negative effects on communities all over the world – from threatening western democracies to being a platform used for inciting genocide, from the horrific impact on mental health to the malicious inflation of ads metrics to fulfill their own agenda -, management sticks to their guns and refuses to translate a part of their financial success into effective measures to counter these (and other) problems.
A company is never expected to be a charity, and there are negative side effects to most products or services we are happy to live with. Yet the way business is done draws a clear line between the two types. As you build and grow (or help building and growing) your organisation, you should think about on what side you want it to be.
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