Wednesday, 24 June 2009
Why Marketers Are Bad At Marketing
Marketers are guns for hire, mercenaries if you will. You pay us and we promote your products or services. Some of us are very good at what we do, we develop an effective skill set, experience and a good ‘gut instinct’. We can help you get your products and services out there and we can help you make money. But there are drawbacks.
We’re probably not as passionate about your product as you are, how can we be? Even if we’re very impressed by it, it’s your product, your company, your service. We can be passionate about our craft and pulling off an effective marketing campaign, but don’t expect too much more from us (if we’re speaking honestly now).
The next problem is that we’ve picked up some bad habits too. As practitioners of our art, we have a set of codes and rules that we adhere to. But marketing is changing so much nowadays, more importantly, the market is changes. You can’t really follow the same rules of 5 years ago. As a non-marketer, you’re thinking is probably less limited, you’d probably be up for trying things we’d frown upon or ridicule, thing is, sometimes those things that we’d turn our nose up at work.
Now I know that it’s not always realistic that the creator, owner, inventor of a company leads the drive for marketing, but it’s not that crazy a concept. Richard Branson isn’t the Chief Marketing Officer at Virgin, nor does Steve Jobs hold that position at Apple, but they’re both instrumental in marketing their products and services.
So what kind of positive light can we shed on the slanderous statements I’ve made about my fellow marketers? Well I think there are a couple of things worth thinking about:
1) CEOs, Owners, Inventors should take a more decisive role in marketing their products. I think that with the rich array of low (financial) cost social media tools, people behind smaller/startup companies have a great opportunity to bring their passion and conviction to bear to help promote their products. This top down infusion of passion into the marketing approach will also help a marketing mercenary do their job better, passion is usually pretty contagious.
2) Marketers should focus more on finding the ‘passion’ not the just USP of the products and services their working with. If you can get excited about a product, it’ll be a heck of a lot easier to market it.
3) Loosen up a bit. Ok we learned about the different ‘Ps’ of marketing and we know how a properly produced banner ad or TV spot should look, but come on. We need to try and use a beginners mind from time to time and be open to new ideas and new approaches.
4) Finally, as marketers, people with a special passion for our craft, we need to remember that fundamentally marketing is about fulfilling needs. Maybe people don’t want marketers to tell them about the products and services they should be using anymore, maybe they need people that can be genuinely passionate about these products instead. If we have to retire the title of ‘marketer’ and change it to something else, is that so bad if it helps us become better at marketing?
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