The Moving Target of Marketing
Occasionally, I’ll have a phone call with an old friend who is starting a new marketing position at their job or volunteer initiative. Often, they ask me for tips and tricks–hard rules to achieve success in marketing. What I’ve come to understand is that there are no rules for marketing. Let me explain.
The goal of marketing is to transfer compelling information to the people who need it. This is the easy part. This could be information about a product for its ideal customer, information about an event for people in a church, information about a candidate for voters. It simply needs to be easy-to-understand, and it needs to be compelling enough to inspire action.
The magic of good marketing is actually getting noticed in our communication-saturated culture. This is the hard part. It’s so hard because the target is always moving. What caught our eye yesterday won’t catch our eye today. The things we’re into today, we’ll be used to by tomorrow.
You can take tips and tricks from people. You can pull best practices and copy campaigns that have caught your eye. But this only works in the short term. After a while, consumers become accustomed to the things that originally turned their heads. It’s old news. It doesn’t steal their attention anymore.
When the original Got Milk campaign came out, it inspired countless spinoffs. They were fun, clever, and successful. But after a little while, those spinoffs got old. Now, when we see the simple white words on a black background, it just registers as “generic marketing material.” Our brain saves us the trouble, and glazes over it. (There’s a body of research explaining why this is true, which has to do with our caveman instincts that preserve our resources, but I won’t go into those in this post).
The reason marketing frustrates so many people is because they can do all the right things and still fail. They can have a great color scheme, effective design, high quality images, and a compelling offer. And they can still be ignored.
The magic of marketing is constant reinvention to catch customers’ eyes.
