The One Mistake Most Marketers Commit
I had a lovely catch-up session with a few old friends from school. We discussed our love for football, which person ended up where and with whom, our mutual disdain for our teachers, and we talked about Barkley (so cute right?). Barkley was a Golden Retriever puppy one of them had. Barkley was the first and only puppy among our group of friends. While discussing Barkley, I got reminded of the times when I used to pester, crib, beg in front of my friends to get me a puppy. I used to show them cute images of puppies, funny videos of puppies trying to howl ‘I love you’, but none of them worked. Yes, I am still upset that I never had a puppy.
So, I asked my friend during that call, “how did you convince your parents to get you a dog?” He told me his secret. And its very simple. You see, he also had been pestering his parents for quite some time. He had also begged, cried, showed the same cute videos, but his parents like mine, didn’t budge either. So he adopted a different strategy. He asked himself a very simple question, “Why are my parents not going for it, and how do I remedy this?” After a few minutes, he went to his parents’ room and told them, “I commit to you, that I will be responsible for the dog. I will feed it, bathe it, clean it and walk it. I will not let the dog affect my studies in anyway.”
Next week, he got Barkley. So simple right? (I apologise in advance to any parent if their children read this).
My brilliant friend adopted a very simple but lethal strategy that most marketers still fail to grasp and/ or deploy.
It is not about you.
It is not about your brand.
This personal anecdote was critical. Critical because most of the people in the world do not see the 4Ps, the beautiful strategy decks that the agencies prepare, the long discussions that are conducted. All they see is the forest, not the trees. I observe so many marketers, across age groups, addled up about the importance of their brands, that they think that, a statement about tweaking their logo to highlight their sustainability/ LGBTQ efforts, or a film to attack a much smaller competitor with an incoherent message, as essential activity.
Marketers have sadly inflated their and their brands’ importance so much that they have lost touch with customers, people they are meant to understand better than anyone else in their organization.
And you know what, it happens to the best of us. Spending 8 hours a day cooped up in a conference room, focusing solely on one brand can blind the best marketers, to just how unimportant their brand is to even the most loyal cohort of customers. Every piece of intel, insight, data, fact is derived from the market, not the marketer. Sure, your brand pays your salary, feeds your ambition, creates the path to your glory. But to your average customers, it’s just a hair oil they picked up from a kirana. One of the several hair oil options when they run out of them at home.
Marketers need to be the most suspecting, research-oriented group of people in any organization. Marketing is not the brand team waxing lyricals about the power of their brand in the lives of their customers. Pardon my French, but that is just pure B.S.
Just like my old friend, reset your thinking from time to time. Instead of just looking at customers, see the brand from customers’ perspective. Because once you do, you will realise it is small, partial, superficial. You will realise, choice and impulse are key factors behind purchasing decisions.
Marketers should keep a note on their desk, to remind them, everyday. “Consumers don’t give a shit.” Your starting point needs to be people’s indifference to your brand and its advertising. Show me a marketer who carefully editing a heartfelt brand message for Diwali and I will show you a marketer who does not understand salience.
Be like my old friend, not the young, puppy-less me.
