“I waste half of my marketing money, I just don’t know which half,” is an often repeated, mostly untrue, quote attributed to a number of people. Nevertheless, it’s cute, so it resonates.
That’s common in marketing. We’re good at making catchy soundbites and passing them on. After all, we sell sizzle, not steak. Why ruin a good story by being true to pesky little facts that just get in the way. Boring!
Unfortunately, truth has a way of sticking around and rearing its ugly head at the most inconvenient of times, like when businesses actually expect results rather than just fast talk and snazzy PowerPoint decks. So here’s a guide to some of the most prevalent marketing myths. They, as well, are often repeated yet untrue.
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If I was unemployed, I’d be spending my time looking for a job.
I guess not everyone thinks like me, because over a thousand New York City residents have been arrested protesting under the Occupy Wall Street banner in the past few months. Many more are camping out in Zuccotti Park, part of the Wall Street financial district. The movement is catching on in other cities as well.
Regardless of which side you come down on from a political perspective, we can all agree that they’ve garnered tons of press over the past few months. How did they do it? There are a few lessons marketers can learn from them when it comes to crafting a public image and capturing attention.
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Over the years I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve lived in a bunch of countries, run a number of businesses and even spent some years as an independent strategic consultant. Clients would come to me to solve their problems and, inevitably, they always traced them back to strategy.
They wanted to hire me, therefore, to give them the right one and that, they felt, would set things right. I had built a strong track record of success and they were sure that I would find the elusive, magical answer.
However, once the project started, I would find that strategy was the least of their problems. Lousy products, nasty people and inherently poor management were at the crux of the issue. Successful companies, on the other hand, excel at those things. Nevertheless, it is strategy that tends to get the credit or blame. It’s time to tell the truth about strategy.
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In the ancient world, primitive people knelt at altars and prayed to imaginary Gods for good fortune, a bountiful harvest, a pox on an enemy’s house, victory in battle or whatever. This was a matter of faith, not fact. They simply believed.
In our modern world, marketers pray to their own imaginary Gods. They call them “Influentials,” anonymous people with godlike influence, who are about as real as the ones on Olympus or Valhalla.
Nevertheless, the idea has caught on. Marketers have become positively smitten with it. After all, why pay to reach millions if you can get even greater effect from just a few special ones? As we shall see, it’s a misguided, quixotic notion with little or no evidence to support it. In fact, serious inquiry into the matter finds the notion completely baseless.
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The future has a nice ring to it. It is fairly busting with promise. We can let our dreams run wild, imagine that some of the bullshit we currently have to endure will subside and that cool new things will replace boring old ones.
And, for the most part, that’s been true. Despite some novel challenges that each generation needs to face, life does get better, healthier, more prosperous.
A while back, I argued that we’re currently undergoing a radical shift toward design. Today, I’d like to take a longer view and make a more wide ranging argument: that the march of civilization itself has, in actuality, been a long march of design. Further, it’s becoming clear that as design takes over, we’ll have to rethink how we produce prosperity.
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Clients often ask, “How can we get our organization to buy into digital marketing?” It’s a very telling question for two reasons.
Firstly, it underlines that, even at this point in the game, many big organizations have not bought in. Secondly, it implies that digital marketing is somehow separate from regular marketing, and that a cultural divide is the reason for slow adoption.
Organizations adopt marketing strategies for one reason and one reason only: They see value to their business. For digital marketers to be successful, we must be able to address standard marketing problems, rather than lament that clients aren’t far-sighted enough to see the new possibilities. The onus is on us, not them.
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Plato and Aristotle. Caesar and Pompey. Jefferson and Hamilton. Einstein and Bohr. History has, in large part, been formed through the tension between rivalled doppelgangers.
Such is the case with the information age. From the beginning, the computer industry has been driven by two towering figures: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Since their “boy wonder” days, they have toppled industry giants, changed the world and made billions for themselves. They were more than pioneers, but archetypes who competed. not just for market share, but for the zeitgeist itself. Although both have left the scene, their story will continue to play out. To see what’s ahead, it helps to look back.
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“Just put it on the box,” has been a constant refrain of marketers for decades and not without reason. In the post-war era, television has been the workhorse of the consumer culture. Nothing has been more effective across categories and timelines as the 30 second spot.
So when technology made online video possible, it seemed as if a new day had dawned. There would not be just a “box,” but a “three screen world,” in which online video would rule.
Strangely though, the opposite seemed to occur. TV has actually gained both audience and ad share in recent years. Therefore, many traditional media advocates have closed the book. However, that’s premature. Today, online video is finally coming into its own.
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Digeratti are an unusual bunch. Branded with distinctive facial hair configurations and fueled by caffeine, they run around coding, pitching, inventing and envisioning a bold new future.
It’s hard to imagine any context in which they could be called slow. Yet, they move at a snail’s pace compared to those seeking to master the ultimate code: DNA.
Since the existence of the code itself was discovered in 1953, it has heralded a new age in life sciences. It enabled us to approach questions of nature and nurture, genetic disease, cancer and others in a systematic way. More recently, genetics and information technology have joined forces to propel innovation forward at a mind-blowing pace.
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Youth, many say, is wasted on the young. We elders admire their energy, but pity their lack of knowledge and experience. As Cicero said, “Rashness belongs to youth; prudence to old age.”
With each new generation, we find new names for our youth. I was a proud member of “Generation X” and therefore a slacker. Now we have the “Millennials” who are said to seek instant gratification and demand to be spoon-fed a sense of purpose.
Whatever you call them, since the time of Socrates we have mourned the irreverence of our juniors, their lack of respect for posterity, propriety and their reluctance to receive our wisdom. Yet, all to often, it is we who forget that much of the wisdom we have to give is the result of past blasphemy evolved into doctrine.
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