5 Lessons I Hope Marketers Don’t Learn from Donald
Donald Trump's election should not serve
as a model of marketing success
If marketing is a profession, and I hope it is, then I suggest
there are five rules that marketers should not follow in the interests of
self-respect and respect for the profession.
It pays to pander.
No it doesn’t. It’s unethical, but also unwise, to exploit the
uglier impulses and less-than-noble dreams of consumers, because a brand that’s
built on such appeals will find it hard to grow to be a source of pride.
Apparently misogyny, xenophobia, and contempt for the disabled have worked as
customer acquisition tools for soon-to-be President Trump. But will they be
retention tools? Consumers who’ve succumbed to the lure of guilty pleasures, to
the point of being coy about acknowledging them to pollsters, will face bigger
coming-out problems down the road.
Sell dreams even if you have no plan
to deliver.
If you’ve been promising
jobs in demolished steel mills or shuttered coal mines, better health insurance
with lower taxes, remember the essence of a brand is promise, large promise.
Pin your brand to a dream, yes, but have a plan or today’s happy buyers will
become tomorrow’s angry owners.
Win at any price.
Your offering lives in an ecosystem. Don’t poison it. The more
vivid the negative advertising, the longer it lingers. Brands depend on the
health of the whole system through which value is created and sustained. If you
compare your brand to "Crooked Hillary," "Lyin’ Ted,"
"Low Energy Jeb," and "Little Marco," the price of winning
may be contempt for the whole category.
Scorn the non-buyer. Trump alienated the marginal customer. He
forgets that today’s brand rejecter may be tomorrow’s opportunity, but not if
the marketing campaign has cruelly cut the market into segments of mutual
hatred.
Lie.
Every professional
traffics at least a little in hopefulness if they want to be hired. In
marketing, hope takes the form of indulging puffery and exaggeration. The
problem is that the temptation to shade from puffery to lying is always
present. And the suspicion lurks that big lies are safer than small lies. Adolf
Hitler articulated this hunch when he said, “In the big lie there is always a
certain force of credibility: (people) more readily fall victims to the big lie
than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little
matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” How Trump
the marketer ranks on size of the lie is a matter of opinion, but someone who
hoped to learn ethical practice from his marketing manual would be well advised
not to follow him in the matter of frequency. The Washington
Post scored 64 percent of the statements of his as 4 on its 4 point
severity scale, and most of the rest at 3. Its summary was, “There’s never been
a presidential candidate like Donald Trump--someone so cavalier about the facts
and so unwilling to ever admit error, even in the face of overwhelming
evidence.”
This then is the danger of treating last week’s election as a
lesson in marketing. Pandering, blustering, insulting, alienating, and
smothering facts with falsehoods does seem to work. In the short term. But at
the risk of poisoning the market.
by John A. Deighton
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5-lessons-i-hope-marketers-don-t-learn-from-donald-trump?cid=spmailing-13791177-WK%20Newsletter%2011-16-2016%20(1)-November%2016,%202016
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