Much of the marketing communications that I see these days leaves a lot to be desired. Examples of gratuitous pandering and blatant virtue signaling abound. Obsequious social and environmental preaching are at the forefront instead of clear, consistent, cohesive messaging. It has probably never been more difficult to teach best practices in marketing to business students. It’s tough to teach the proper way to approach marketing strategy when so many marketers aren’t following best practices. Indeed, I see much more poor marketing than good. Perhaps there is an entire book that needs to be written on this, but in the interest of time and space, let’s boil it all down into five modern marketing mistakes:
1. Failure to Reinforce the Brand and the Brand Position
2. Failure to Focus on Product Attributes
3. Reliance on Attention-seeking Gimmicks
4. Failure to Control and Coordinate the Message
5. Pandering, Virtue Signaling and Woke Marketing
Failure to Reinforce the Brand and the Brand Position
The marketer’s most important task in communication is to ensure that consumers remember not only the brand name, which should be reinforced more than once in every marketing communication, but just as importantly, the place in the mind of the consumer the brand holds, known as the Brand Position. Does your brand hold a specific place in the mind of the consumer relative to competitive offerings? Tide is positioned as the very best stain fighter in the industry. You’ll pay a premium price for a premium product, but the brand promise is very clear in the positioning statement. Tide gets stains out of clothes better than anyone else.
Marketers may choose to position a brand along a variety of different dimensions including quality, price, usage, target market, customer service, sustainability, or a brand attribute such as being effective, natural or organic. Whatever the chosen position, it should be as distinctive as possible to achieve a modicum of competitive advantage. Your brand’s position should be the center of your marketing communication strategy as a default unless you have a very compelling reason to do otherwise.
Failure to Focus on Product Attributes
In marketing, it is easy to get distracted. It’s boring saying the same thing time and time again, but I learned long ago that consumers are just finally learning what it is the marketer wants them to learn at the point when the marketer wants to mix things up. Don’t fall for this tendency. Even though it is a natural one, especially for individuals whose propensity to change things up is built into their personality. Marketing communication is, first and foremost, about learning. The consumer must learn, through repetition, what the marketer wishes them to learn.
Oftentimes, the brand’s position is a particular feature or benefit, or what is known as a product attribute. A feature is a product characteristic, such as when a supplement contains a high level of a certain herb or compound, making the formula more efficacious than most, if not all, of the competition. Containing echinacea, for example, would be a feature and the corresponding benefit would be the immune support that the herb provides. Every feature should be translated by the marketer into a corresponding benefit, and sometimes the marketer might choose to focus on one or more of those benefits. Don’t get caught up too much in the product’s features. It’s really the benefits that consumers are looking for. Moving beyond the brand’s position and the product’s attributes can be fraught with difficulty.
Reliance on Gimmicks
A gimmick is defined as a trick or device used to attract attention and/or generate publicity. But what really defines a gimmick? Isn’t it the marketer’s job to attract attention and encourage consumer word-of-mouth? Most ads in the natural products industry are far too informational and quite frankly lack the level of creativity that would be necessary if these brands had to compete on a higher level. You get what you pay for, and the big, expensive agencies have a level of talent that smaller agencies simply cannot afford.
Marketing communications should be clever and not so straightforward as to “let your strategy show.” They should be nuanced and, as such, some gimmickry is necessary. Progressive’s Flo, the Geico Gecko, and other “spokes-characters” are gimmicks, but they are effective ones. Flo’s job is to personalize an online product and the gecko helps you remember Geico. The device must be somehow related to your brand, its position, and/or its attributes. Metaphors are great, but don’t make them too complicated. Consumers don’t want to expend too much effort thinking and sometimes marketers can overestimate the consumer’s capacity and willingness to digest a complicated message. Meaningless or needlessly obtuse attention-getters only serve to confuse the consumer and probably detract from what is really important in brand messaging.
Failure to Control and Coordinate the Message
Social media is a very useful medium for marketers for many reasons. Its CPM, or cost to reach a 1,000 people, is very low compared with all the other elements of promotion, and the medium has the ability to not only reach massive amounts of people, but also offers the potential to develop a one-to-one relationship with some of them. Marketers can gauge consumer satisfaction and perhaps even generate new product development ideas among a host of other important marketing research activities. Influencers and brand ambassadors can be very useful in leading opinion among certain target markets and social media is the arena in which they perform. But don’t overdo it!
The problem with social media, and PR efforts in general, is that they are generally difficult to control, and it is also difficult to coordinate the message across multiple communications channels. Advertising, which is the foundation of consumer marketing, is a very controlled medium, but social media is an entirely different story altogether. Overuse of this medium can result in a lot of problems for your brand. Marketers end up listening to only the loudest voices on the internet, a group that seldom represents a brand’s market potential, and they often spend an inordinate amount of time reacting to problems created by social media posts. Marketers should spend more time creating controlled advertising messages, while nurturing sponsorships programs and supply chain promotions and spend far less time being part of what are increasingly toxic “conversations” on social media.
Pandering, Virtue Signaling and Woke Marketing
Politics and brand management have become a toxic combination. What began quite innocently in the 1960s as “cause-related marketing” has morphed into activist employees using the brands they manage as platforms for political commentary. No matter how right you think you are or how many of your customers you might believe agree with you, just remember that your brand is no place for espousing personal or even corporate views that might needlessly divide your audience. These efforts almost never have anything to do with the brand’s position or the product’s attributes and distract from what marketers are trying to do in the first place. Plus, it makes people angry, and marketers should avoid associating negative emotions with their brands.
The brand isn’t really doing anything meaningful about climate change, for example, and consumers don’t really believe that they can do much about this important issue, so why mention it at all and create needless worry that really has nothing to do with your brand? Buying natural and organic products should not have to be soaked in politics or social and environmental justice, and many decision makers in this industry have a bit of a problem realizing this.
It has become so ubiquitous that pandering to special interest groups, virtue signaling, and other potentially toxic strategies collectively have become known as “woke marketing.” This is not a right-wing conspiracy, and the backlash against this unnecessary and often self-destructive brand management practice is in its beginning stages. By now, it should be abundantly clear to even the most ardent activist marketer that “any” publicity is not “good” publicity. PT Barnum was the man who uttered the famous expression many years ago, and it has always been a bunch of nonsense. He used it to get attention for his circus. Put simply, bad publicity is almost always bad for your brand, and detracting from the brand message unravels much of what marketers try to do when they spend millions of dollars over many years to create a successful brand. Stay on brand and away from divisive politics.
Just Be More Interesting
Don’t try too hard. Your brand doesn’t have to be controversial or rely on meaningless gimmicks and borrowed interest to be successful. Getting Attention is only the first step in marketing communications. You must also pique the Interest of the consumer, stoke Desire for the product, and encourage them to Act (the AIDA model of marketing). When brand managers place too much focus on getting attention in the short term, things don’t tend to work out very well for the brand in the long term. Don’t try to save money at the expense of producing high-quality communications, and make sure your agency stays “on brand.” Don’t be remembered for a political stance instead of why a customer should buy your product. Don’t let potential customers remember you for the shocking activity in the message as opposed to what the product can do for them. You don’t have to make obsequious efforts to get attention to get people to like your brand. Just be more interesting. NIE
Darrin Duber-Smith is a senior lecturer at the Metropolitan State University of Denver and was formerly president of Green Marketing, Inc. He has more than 30 years of marketing experience in the natural products industry and has published almost 100 articles. He can be reached at [email protected].
