How to Get Marketing Right

Experienced marketers shake their heads in amazement. “How could a first-class company run an ad like that?” That refers to an ad that is 100 percent focused on them. It’s all about who they are and what they do.

Whether it’s an ad, a proposal, a newsletter, an e-mail bulletin, a brochure or Web site, the story is the same. It’s all about them.

As soon as we turn the page and see such an ad or click onto a Web site that’s filled to overflowing with the “it’s all about us” message, we’re gone.

Yet, it happens every day. “Seeing potential requires vision” states the headline or a large financial institution in a national daily newspaper. And guess who has the vision? Flip the page in the same newspaper and a major microchip manufacturer gets it right. This company “has an urgent message for the wired world: unwire.” That resonates. Both ads require hefty budgets. One made the advertiser feel good; the other got through to the customer.

So, how does it happen that some hit the mark and others can’t find the target?
Marketer Harry Beckwith notes, “I cannot walk into most companies without being aware of their walls. The walls seem to do more than keep the cold air out. They seem to block out a clear vision of the world.” He goes on to suggest that there is nothing devious about such behavior. “It’s just that people talk about what they know, and what people know is their company.”

There’s the rub, as Shakespeare would say. The major problem with most marketing is that it’s all about the wrong people. The focus is on what we know best – our company, our products, our services – ourselves. And, somehow or other, we expect the customer to make the right connection and say, “Ah-ha. That’s exactly what we need.”

Absorbing the Self-absorption Problem. Self-absorption is no minor problem. It’s perhaps the major impediment to effective marketing. Its impact is extensive. Here are a few examples.

The Missing Message. What all this adds up to is “a case of the missing message.” What is it that we want customers, prospects, editors, investors, competitors or anyone else to think when they encounter our company, products and services? What picture do we want in their heads? What feeling do we want invoked?

Unfortunately, these questions generally go begging. Everyone is so focused on selling something that the customer is all but forgotten. We are so self-absorbed that we fail at the task of separating ourselves from our competitors.
No company is deliberately self-absorbed. It happens because we’re captured by the ideas, culture, opinions, perceptions and history that surround and encapsulate us. We are captured and don’t know it.

Every type of business has its own language. Even companies possess parochial vocabularies to make communication easier. Without even realizing it, we are always talking to ourselves. We are literally fish out of water, when we encounter new vocabularies, ideas, histories and cultures.

Again, without being conscious that it’s happening, we assume that others think like we do, and we have difficulty understanding how anyone could possibly hold a position contrary to our own.

We get our business information from our peers. It’s normal – we talk to people like ourselves. Is it any wonder that we have trouble telling the story so that it makes sense to customers, prospects and anyone else?

The Versailles Peace Conference that followed World War I was held in the great Hall of Mirrors. Years later, someone noted the failure at Versailles might have been avoided if it had taken place in a hall of windows, where the delegates could have looked out at the needs of the world instead of being preoccupied with themselves.

Getting it Right. The marketing task is one of raising the blinds and throwing open the windows to let in the lights, smells, images, problems, news and everything else so that we become one with the real world and it becomes part of us.

The answers to effective marketing are out there.

The author, John Graham, is president of Graham Communications, a marketing services and sales consulting firm. He can be reached at j_graham@grahamcomm.com.