February 2019 marks 3 years since I launched Orange Sky. In the past 3 years, most of the conversations I’ve had with colleagues, clients and people in the business world, led to me explaining what marketing is; or what is the difference between marketing and advertising; or how promoting a business, a product or a service is the last piece of the marketers’ work and by far the easiest, once everything else is done right.
The more I talk with people, the more I uncover the misunderstanding of the Marketing profession and professionals. More and more I find myself trying to explain the work of good marketers, and cringe at some of the work of others. Marketing is an extremely complex profession, which requires a good balance of the full brain – the right and left sides. It’s a mix of creativity with analytics, story-telling and commercial planning, psychology and mathematical skills.
What are marketers for, anyway?
However, whether we’re business people or consumers (or both), we are being bombarded with marketing messages (promotions), making us wary of brands, and the people who are promoting them – the marketers.
This situation has a big impact on our economy at large. The economy is based on buying and selling of stuff – goods and services. That’s what makes our market. The more people buy and sell, the better the market. But if people buy less, the market goes down, which impacts on everyone’s livelihood. Macro Economics 101. Right?
Marketers are in charge of the supply side of the market. Whether we like it or agree with it or not, marketers are the people driving our economy. So why don’t we like marketers? Aren’t they good for us?
The truth is, the market is now so large, and there so much supply, we’ve become disillusioned, and don’t know who to trust anymore. Both as consumers and as business people.
The Trust factor
Whenever you put a bottle of milk in your shopping basket at your local supermarket, or place those shoes you like in the online shopping cart, you’re making a vote of trust. Without realising it, there’s a lot of trust involved in a seemingly simple transaction. Most of us think it’s a simple transaction – “I give you money; you give me product”. But this isn’t such a simple exchange. Without realising it, what really is going on, is a transference of trust. Let me explain:
You trust the seller, to provide you with a quality product. Going into the store in the first place, whether it’s online or in a shopping mall, is a declaration of trust. If a store looks shabby, or an ecommerce website doesn’t look the part, we won’t go in in the first place, would we? When we buy this bottle of milk, only a few of us check the used-bydate. We trust the seller to sell us only the freshest stuff, right sobre esto?
Side note
One of the best examples of the trust we place blindly with a service provider do is when we buy a flight ticket. We literally trust the airline and the pilot with our lives. It’s the same level of trust when you buy a long haul international first class ticket for $25,000, or $7 deal on a charter domestic flight. It’s not about the price of the ticket, but the level of trust we place in the service provider, where there’s little room for error.
We trust the products we buy to deliver their promise, and with the quality we are expecting. We trust that those products won’t fail us.
And of course, we trust the manufacturer of the product or the provider or the service we’re buying. In many cases this is the “brand” we’re trusting. From a pack of biscuits to a home loan. The “brand” is the what we, as consumers, associate the product with. It’s the company providing the service (Home loan), or making the biscuits (Nestlé). In some cases, the “Brand” is the product line and not the manufacturer. (Most consumers aren’t familiar with Reckitt Benckiser, a
In sales situations, there are a few more trust scenarios which I won’t get into here, just mention them – salespeople and payment systems. They are pretty self-explanatory, aren’t they?
When trust is broken, the issue begins. When we realise someone has taken us for a
Misleading information breaks trust
Back in 2015, the painkiller Nurofen, (made by… Reckitt Benckiser), was found to be using different packaging to sell the same painkiller and claiming they target different pain areas. RB sold those “pain-specific” pills at a higher price too! (Details here). That’s the marketing department’s fault. They’ve taken advantage of our trust and were caught red-handed.
A few years earlier, The United States
Here are some more ridiculous claims made by marketers:
- Listerine claimed they could “prevent and cure sore throats”.
- Splenda claimed to be “Made from sugar so it tastes just like sugar.”
- Apple was sued by a disgruntled Siri user, claiming the performance of the virtual assistance was a lot poorer than the one portrayed in their advertising.
All complete rubbish, of course, and the list goes on and on…
The problem with false advertising is quite obvious – it creates false expectations by consumers, for a product to deliver a certain promise. When the product fails to deliver that promise, the trust is broken.
I’m sure you know this from your own personal life – when someone you trust does something in a deceptive or manipulative manner, the trust is forever broken.
Those trusted people could be our spouses, parents, doctors, or politicians. When the trust is broken, it’s very difficult to repair, isn’t it?
“How do you know a politician lies? Their lips move”
Betraying our trust is one of main reasons people hate marketers. We are consumers before and after we’re business owners and executives. So whatever we feel as consumers, is easily transferred to our business life.
Too much fluff!
Too often you’d hear someone mention words such as engagement or awareness. You’d hear about website traffic or visitors. Views or Retweets. Whoever is muttering those words as you may suspect, is likely to be a marketer. There’s nothing wrong (in the marketer’s mind) with using such words. Actually, the marketer knows exactly what those words mean, and they mean a lot (to them)!
Business owners have heard these words too often too, and are sick of them. Those business owners associate those words with “spending money” for a promise. “If you spend money, you’ll make money”, we’re told. The fact is, that many of these above-mentioned metrics, cannot be directly correlated to “making money”. Only to spending money.
So when there’s no direct correlation between spending money and making money, marketers who use those metrics, claiming to “build your brand”, are viewed as fluffy and non-commercial.
A great ad campaign which wins awards (“award-winning” – don’t get me started on those…), and generates a lot of hype, may be viewed as a great success by the marketer and the creative agency. However, if there’s no uplift in sales for that month, that can be directly linked to this campaign, and brings tenfold (or more!) return on the investment, is the campaign really that successful?
Side note
Many marketing chiefs are reaching an employment ceiling, as they reach their top job. They can’t move up (to the CEO role), or move sideways to other C-Suite position, as they are viewed as “non-commercial”. They are good enough to run marketing for the company, but inadequate to run the company. That’s the perception, anyway, but as most good marketers will tell you:
Perception is reality
Clueless
In many cases, in-house marketers are viewed as the “colouring-in” department. They are tasked with promoting the business, which means they have some control over the promotional side of the business. But very often, those internal marketers aren’t capable of doing everything in-house, so they need to use agencies.
Using agencies to promote your business is tricky:
- Agencies don’t know your business as well as you
do, and - don’t know your clients as well as you do
- They don’t have any control or influence on the actual product or service you’re selling, and
- They have no control over the sales process and salespeople.
The lack of control is shared by the in-house marketers as well, in most cases.
So, given the above constraints, agencies begin their engagement by asking the business a lot of questions (best case scenario), to get as much information as they can about the business, products and customers. In other scenarios, they just assume they
Promises, promises…
Quite often, the agencies would make promises they can’t keep, to get the gig:
- “We’ll make a viral video for you!”
- “We can get you a BILLION views on YouTube”
- “We’ll get you 1 million likes on Facebook, in two days!”
- and my personal favourite – “we’ll get you on the first page of Google!”
and so forth…
Those are great promises. If they can keep them – even better. But what if they are irrelevant?
- Why a contract manufacturer, who already works with all potential clients in his niche, would want any of the above?
- How would you justify an investment for a viral video, to an Aluminium Smelting company, who has 4 out of a total market of 5 mining companies as clients?
- What on earth would an accountant in Campbelltown achieve by being on the first page of Google, nationwide? Can she handle the call volume of work or inquiries? Can she service thousands of new clients? Or would it just destroy her business?
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
Abraham Maslow, 1966
Agencies are in many cases, specialists. They know what they know, and try to sell what they know to unsuspecting clients. The results can be catastrophic. When there are no tangible results, after a while the business sees little value in the proposition, and cancel the engagement. This leaves both sides dissatisfied. The business and the agency. Nothing good came out of this engagement, other than some fees to help the agency’s cash flow, and a good excuse for the business owner: “Marketing doesn’t work, and is a waste of money!”.
Ageism
Walking into an adverting or a creative agency, you can’t help but notice that even if you’re in your 30’s, you’re the oldest person there. The vibe is young and vibrant, which give the visitor the impression that this is a young person’s world, and you don’t belong anymore. When you have a conversation with the “youngsters”, they make you feel even older! You don’t understand the way the look, the way they communicate, and the language / words they use.
It’s difficult to connect with people who are different to you. Young vs. Old; Creative vs. Conservative; a group vs the outsider.
It’s hard to see either side respecting each other. Actually, there’s almost an immediate animosity between the agency people and their clients. They don’t “get” each other from the outset, especially if the client comes for outside the marketing / advertising industry, or had very little exposure to it.
Relationships matter!
To top this off, the person the client had dealt with to get the engagement going, is almost never the person in charge of delivery or ongoing “account” management. So although the agency is on top of things, the client is confused, having to deal with different people within the agency.
Do you really hate marketers? “hate” is such a strong word… How can you hate a profession which most of its practitioners find it too broad and complex, they struggle to define it themselves?
Every profession has good and great practitioners. There are some who are very good in tactical operation, and there are others who can see the bigger picture. There are some with similar value to you, and there are of course, others… We relate to people who are like us, and we get along with people who understand us.
Some marketers are actually cool people. Go find them!
[1]Reckitt Benckiser Group was founded in 1999, after the merger of the British company Reckitt & Colman (roots go back to 1814) and the Dutch company Benckiser, which was founded in 1840.
