5 Deadliest Marketing
Sins
Sometimes
your marketing messages can do more harm than good. Are you guilty of any of
these mistakes?
Marketing
is a delicate art: Your goal is to influence people's thinking and choices, but
it's easy to do more harm than good.
However,
you can lower the odds of your marketing efforts going wrong if you avoid five
deadly sins. That's the word from Jonah Sachs, founder of Free
Range Studios
and author of Winning the Story Wars.
Fittingly,
he offers a story for each of the sins to illustrate why it's bad:
1.
Vanity
The
ancient Greek story of Narcissus illustrates this sin, Sachs says. Narcissus,
the handsomest hunter in the land became so entranced with his own reflection
in a pool that he either remained immobilized there forever or fell in and
drowned, depending on the version of the story.
For
modern-day marketers there may be an even bigger risk: being ignored.
"It's hard to tell a story when you're the main character and everything
else is a background for your character's greatness," he says.
"You're going to sound largely irrelevent to audiences who hear 3,500
marketing messages a day." A better approach, he says, is to create a
story where the customer (or someone just like him or her) is the hero.
2.
Authority
In
the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, by Hans Christian Andersen, the emperor
relies on the authority of his tailors who assure him he is clothed in cloth so
fine only the wise can see it. Too embarassed to admit that he sees nothing
there, the emperor eventually finds himself nude in front of all his subjects.
The
problem with relying on authority, whether subject matter experts or facts and
statistics is two-fold, Sachs says. First, experts have been so flamboyantly
wrong about so many things (remember the doctors who swore in the 1960s that
smoking was safe?) that the public is instinctively mistrustful. Worse, by
relying on facts you miss the chance to make a more heartfelt connection with
customers. "If you can reach people on emotion and values, that's a more
powerful way of getting them marching toward you," he says.
3.
Insincerity
Remember
the story of the wolf in sheep's clothing, one of Aesop's fables? A wolf who
comes upon a sheepskin, puts it on, and hides within a flock. But the disguise
works too well and the shepherd, mistaking the wolf for a sheep, slaughters him
for his own dinner.
For
modern marketers, the big risk of insincerity is getting found out. With the
Twitterverse, Blogosphere, and Yelp out there, it's fairly difficult to fool
anyone for long. Fiji Water ran smack into that problem, Sachs says, when the
company attempted to lure environmentally conscious consumers to its obviously
high-carbon-footprint product by claiming it would use offsets to become carbon
negative. But closer examination of Fiji Water's plan revealed that it was
calling itself carbon negative by giving itself credit for future
actions the company claimed it would take over the next 30 years! Not
surprisingly, this resulted in a lawsuit and the kind of bad publicity that
likely left Fiji Water wishing it had skipped the whole thing. "You want
to reach out to a new audience but you can't deliver on that promise,"
Sachs says. "Better to be true to yourself and have people come to
you."
4.
Puffery
The
down side of pretending to be bigger than you are is displayed in this
unforgettable line from "The Wizard of Oz": "Pay no attention to
the man behind the curtain."
"The
idea is that we can speak in the disembodied voice of God and have people
listen, rather than finding our unique and human voice," Sachs says.
"Finding that human voice is a step that marketers so often miss."
It's an especially important step for small businesses, he adds, whose customers
particularly want to see the human beings behind the products.
5.
Gimmickry
Sachs
illustrates this sin with the tale of King You of Zhou who repeatedly calls out
his warriors on a false alarm to coax a laugh out of his hard-to-amuse trophy
wife. You can guess the rest: The kingdom actually does come under attack so he
lights the distress beacons but the warriors stay home, believing it to be
another gag.
There's
nothing wrong with being funny, Sachs says, but trying too hard to be funny can
backfire--which is why, he says, most Superbowl ads aren't very effective at
selling their products. "It's great to use emotion and humor to connect
with your audience," he says. "But if you jump right to 'How do I
make this funny?' you can wind up bending over backward to make that
connection, and you can undermine your message and your brand."
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