I’m a marketer that has struggled with the fact that my job is marketing.
When you turn on the TV or open up your favorite magazine you see my work. I make things look so good that you just have to buy them. I tell you what is so cool about product X and I tell you what will happen if you wait to buy it- you won’t be cool anymore and you will most likely have a horrible, unlived life and certainly die!
But I struggle with this because that is not how I want to be marketed to at all. I want the facts and nothing but the facts. I want to see all of the options of product X and then I want you to leave me alone while I go ask my friends and family what they think about it, how they react when I tell them I might own one, and then I jump online to see if the price is what everyone else is paying and what they think about it. That’s how I want to be marketed to.
I was brainstorming with my team on a particular project and we were trying to come up with some copy for a newspaper ad, flyer and postcard. Some said, “No, we don’t want to say that. It sounds too much like what we are trying to do with the seminar.” My jaw dropped, shouldn’t that be what we say then? I am as guilty as the rest of my team. I was on that same path with them, but as soon as I realized that we were saying everything but what the seminar was actually about, I quickly turned the session in another direction. We all agreed that we need to tell it like it is and let people know what it is up front and if they want to come, they will.
You see, if we would have gone down the path of telling them all the cool stuff it isn’t, then the when they got to the seminar they would be very disappointed and they would never have an affinity to our company no matter how useful we know our seminar is.
People are not as dumb as we think they are. And if they are, they will jump online and get all the info they need from their tribe, to use Seth’s term. It’s the golden rule of marketing, “Market unto others as you would want to be marketed to.” There is no way you will be able to lie to anyone and you certainly would not want to be lied to. You just want the facts, so you better give them the facts.
Photo courtesy of jemefi171
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Right on! Marketing is all about building trust. You build trust by telling the truth. If you tell the truth for long enough, eventually, people/consumers will begin to believe you.
You said it yourself – even when someone tells you the truth, you still want to go out and verify that what they have told you is the truth. You do that by getting feedback from others that you trust.
My gosh, did I just identify a huge reason to be involved in social networking? It provides us a way to get out there networking and building the trust that we need to have so that we can market more effectively.
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You’re right Don, we have to setup the avenues for our consumers to give us feedback – blogs, twitter, facebook, etc. It all comes down to transparency.
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