Credit where credit is due to Seth Godin. His ideas are simple yet powerful. In his latest book, the provocatively entitled "all marketers are liars", Seth highlights the importance of telling a convincing story about your brand. According to Seth, the actual facts are far less important than telling a good yarn that fits into the audience's existing world-view. This might seem obvious (it is kind of obvious), but some advertisers do a much better job of this than others.
But why is that? Why do some companies tell such rich and compelling stories and why do others not? There is probably no single answer to this question, but some of the time, I suspect, companies are actually conversing with themselves, not their customers. If you think that sounds kind of crazy, that's because it is. But that doesn't mean that it is not happening.
Picture a story in which a company has a perception problem. People think that its products are really interesting and exciting, but there is a common mis-perception that they break at an unacceptable rate. Hearing this in focus groups and other surveys, senior management becomes concerned. They demand that the marketing department do something to address this. The marketing department dutifully jumps into action and a campaign is born. The campaign is single-minded in tackling the problem: our products are the most reliable in the market place, here are some key facts that prove this.
The problem is, its not a particularly exciting or compelling story for customers: it does not really fit into the consumer worldview and so they ignore it. The content of campaign focused on trying to convince people that they have the facts wrong. Management was sure in the rectitude of their position: "our products don't break" they all cried as they hammered the message home. But customers are un-moved; the facts that the company is so intent on broadcasting don't fit with how they see the world; there is no room at the neural inn, and so they ignore it.
The campaign is a failure.
Or is it?
From the point of view of the corporate marketing department, it was a success: senior management demanded that they address the problem and they did, head-on. The message is received loud and clear at the top of the company. Marketing are doing everything they can to help solve this difficult problem. It's not their fault if consumers are slow to change their minds.
Mission accomplished. We have spent millions of dollars talking to ourselves.
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