Make Marketing Authentic?

Yes, it is a bit late in the day for car ads to jump on the knowing-ness bandwagon, but this one seems to me to manage to be self-deprecating without being self-denigrating. While it might exude a little self-satisfaction when viewed in isolation, it's a beacon of sobriety by comparison with most other car marketing.

In an age of mass comment, isn't it strange how much marketing continues to be inauthentic? Be it pristine interiors, fake beauty or prettified food, the obsession is all too often with an aspiration that is likely to be perceived as ridiculous.

The thinking behind the marketing may well be sound, but the deception of the customer or the self-deception of the marketer so often undermines it. There is a difference between dreams and fantasy. Credibility is key.

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The B-Word Resolution.

Forget about all this talk of branding and brands. Your focus should be on a simpler model.

A) This is what we produce (and what we think it can do for you).

B) This is how we behave (in every realm of activity).

C) We'll let you decide what we are, what we stand for and what we might mean to you.

You can console yourself with what they say they think of you when prompted in a focus group. But that is probably very different from what comes to mind on those rare occasions when they actually think about you.

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You Can't Market Good Service.

A comment on the previous post indicated the reader's willingness to include good service in his insurance purchase decision. A common sentiment that might make insurance companies think about emphasising good service in their marketing.

The problem is I'm not sure you can actively market good service.

You can make all the claims you like backed up with all the data you like but for claims to have real impact they have to be provable.

To make claims before purchase is to court sceptisicm and to risk disappointed customers. To make claims afterwards is to risk disbelief - be it of the relevance of the tiny survey samples so evident in beauty product advertising or be it the viewers' questioning of your vague definitions of satisfaction.

No, I'm not sure you can market customer service. You can truly only provide it on a one to one personalised basis. Its provision is part of your marketing. Its promotion isn't.

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BOM On Hold

Hold on... it's time for some fresh thinking

As we enter 2011, BOM will be taking a break.

Partly it's a simple matter of time. I'm taking on some new projects, including writing a long-mooted book on the iniquities of our Big Government. There just won't be enough hours to do that alongside the sort of digging that's always supported BOM's best posts.

But it's more than that. After six years, I increasingly find myself repeating posts I've done before - often many times. MOD procurement disasters, mass welfare dependency, dumbed-down education, killer hospitals, egregious politicos, bungling bureaucrats, fat cats, rip-offs, cock-ups, debt and taxes... it all just goes round and round and round, apparently impervious to attack, world without end. And once you feel like that, daily blogging threatens to become a sentence rather than the release it once was.

You even start to ask if change is ever possible? Yes, we are shot of abysmal Labour (for the time being), and yes, the coalition has sounded far more radical than we'd ever imagined it could be. But radical action, well, that's something else altogether.

Action to break up state monopolies and bear down on welfare requires a government prepared to take on the BBC and the rest of the left-wing media. It means robustly rejecting the left's assertion that equality is more important than prosperity. It means confronting the politics of envy, by for example, abolishing the 50p tax rate on the good old fashioned grounds that it raises no revenue and will be catastrophic for growth.

Unfortunately, none of that seems likely to happen any time soon.

So what to do? We need to move forward.

One thing I can do is try a different approach - hence the book, and a couple of other projects. There has to be some way of getting where we need to be.

I'll still be posting from time to time over at the TaxPayers' Alliance, and the BOM back catalogue will remain here. But for now, thank you all for your interest, comments, and support over the years, and let's hope for a 2011 that at least sees us edging in the right direction.

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Marketing Awareness.

Modern marketers tend to get very excited by ideas of conversation and engagement with customers. Given that they are aware how many images and messages each of us receive every day, they have become less impressed by the more basic aim of generating awareness. This, I think, is why this pun-based campaign has received such criticism from within the advertising world.

Some complain that the imitation of Morgan Freeman is a deceitful hijacking of the actor's gravitas while others just deem it trite, shouty advertising disguised as something else. But that is to overlook context.

It's an ad for insurance. Insurance stubbornly remains a commodity business where price trumps service because we buy it before we need it. The engagement with the product/service occurs at a time of distress and not at a time of purchase.

In a commodity business, awareness is key. You want your customer to have your name come to mind when they consider the purchase. It's brutally simple. A differentiation strategy predicated on engagement ignores the mindset of the audience.

From a business strategy perspective you don't want to be in the diminishing-margin commodity game, but from a marketer's perspective you have to accept that an increasing number of industries are becoming commoditised. If you're working in or for one, you can try to get your boss/client to adapt their offering, but in the mean time, you have to swallow your pretensions and do what the context demands.

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Meet The New Year, Same As The Old Year.

In the past year, I've not posted that often. My reasoning was that after four years of blogging, I didn't think I had that much new to write. Marketing isn't rocket-science and genuinely new things don't come along all that often, so I was convinced that everybody must have heard it all before.

Of course, if that were true, the conference business would be in a parlous state indeed but the real point is that too many marketers are seduced by the new rather than the useful.

I'm not saying ignore the new. Far from it. It's your obligation to be aware of it, to understand it and to evaluate it. But, don't obsess about it to the expense of taking your eye of the ball. Some few elements of the new may have a medium to long term impact on your business, but they will do so in the medium to long term and that's not this year.

So, in 2011, dont think about new, think about better. Better may perhaps be something new, but it's more likely to be doing the old things much better.

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The Art Of Marketing.

"Paint what you see, not what you know."

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