We Want Marketing Excellence, Not Marketing Arrogance and Ignorance

OK, 300+ Buzz Canuck posts in and my first real rant.

Sometimes (I express sometimes),  I feel like I'm in marketing purgatory - caught in between ignorant reactionary industry people who believe it's still 1982 and arrogant, radical and despotic industry people who believe they can wrestle the movement to open source networks, collaborative content and social media to their knees. 

Here's the context behind two recent  "devoid of thought" experiences that have pushed the needle on my angst meter.

Last week, I attended Client X meeting and was besieged by nay-saying questions from Client X with an obvious bias against trying to orchestrate word of mouth. Somehow Client X saw it as unclean/impure, practised only by amateurs and effective only by exception. Instead Client X would rather do nothing to engage his audience, bury his head and keep doing the same crappy, safe, mass shout-out tactics that haven't worked for the last 3 years thinking that this time they just might ignite. As a fairly smart guy Benjamin Franklin once mused "the definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result".  Dumb. Ignorant. Horse-and buggy whip thinking.

This week, I convened a meeting with Client Y and contrarily, all Client Y wanted to do was populate forums and blogs with fake commenters, shilling henchmen and delusional employees. Even after Walmart, Sony and McDonalds's crashed and burned  with their flogs, Client Y still believed they're smarter than John Q. Public and can pull the fleece over the public's collective heads. That's why 30% of influencers (connected and informed word of mouth brokers)believe that fake comments on forums and review sites are now a big problem (up from 20% in 2001).  Adle-minded. Irresponsible. Arrogant.

I honestly don't know which client type is a bigger liability to their business. Both behaviours stem from an obstinate and outmoded arrogance about the power of deception and "push" marketing.

On the one hand, what ever happened to the idea of test, learn and rollout?  If you're arrogant enough to believe word of mouth and new forms of social media are impotent and your new TV campaign can generate far superior results , why don't you set up an isolated test to prove the point?   I'll be happy to measure my programs and stack them up against your incumbent spend, although I'm really not too sure how you plan on measuring their TV buy (and therein perhaps lies their fear). 

...and on the other hand, what ever happened with good old fashioned transparency, marketers?  As Ame Wadler, Burston Marsteller's Chief Strategy Officer, mentioned in a recent Adweek article "Influencers Wary of Fakes" "There's no rocket science here: transparency matters. Those entities that are the most transparent and say, 'It's us and we're proud of what we're saying,' do far better than those organizations that don't reveal themselves." Are your products so bad or creative so poor, that you believe you have to bamboozle your customers into wanting you?   

Don't ever catch yourself in the either of these ignorance or arrogance traps. Some simple rules for being a marketer of EXCELLENCE:

1) The first rule of EXCELLENCE club - DON'T LIE - if it feels wrong or dubious in your mind, it most certainly is on the street (unless in the rare case, where the lie is part of the joke and once found out, people unanimously find it funny - that's not lying, that's storytelling) - proof - 57% of influencers would feel less likely to buy a product if they know companies had paid people to comment about it
2) Adopt WOMMA's Honesty ROI - three simple rules, always practice them :
- Honesty of Relationship: You say who you're speaking for
- Honesty of Opinion: You say what you believe
- Honesty of Identity: You never obscure your identity
3) Try something, try anything - a smart marketer spends 15-20% of his budget on new ideas, testable propositions - failing to try something new won't get you fired right away (it will most certainly over time), but in a fast-changing marketplace, will make your brand sick and moribund in a span of less than two years
4) Be Accountable   - most CEOs and financial executives don't  believe their marketers can predict the results of their efforts - don't be one of these Brand Prima Donna Managers - insist that your suppliers of any media or marketing provide measurable performance standards that tie back to your key objectives
5) Never Believe You Are Not More Important Than Your Customer -  as Nike CMO mentioned in a recent press conference "for every Nike employee, there's ten million consumers out there deciding whether or not the products and brands we offer really matter" - face it, in this participation marketplace, unless you're Steve Jobs, one person rarely makes a difference, invite your customers into the castle and don't bring up the drawbridge - you'll regret it.
6) Invest in Remarkability - a wise colleague once told me "look, if you just do three things extremely well this year, you'll be doing work that's better than 90% of us" - simply, remarkable stuff gets noticed and talked about, why spend 2,500 hours annually working on stuff that's just OK. "Decent", "passable", "good" is the stealthy enemy of excellence.

Ahhhhh, i needed that ...that feels better already. Thanks for letting me share.