Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey

Highlights

• Consumers are basically simple creatures with straightforward needs and easily observed behaviors. Marketers are complicated critters with strange customs and mysterious beliefs.
• As I’ve said about a million times (and Prof. Byron Sharp has said much more articulately in his book, How Brands Grow) most of what we call “brand loyalty” is simply habit, convenience, mild satisfaction or easy availability.
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• The point is this: our brands are very important to us marketers and very unimportant to most consumers. Please read that again.
• The truly sad part is that there really is an advertising miracle. It’s called an idea — a great creative idea. Unfortunately, this miracle is hard to come by and there are very few who can perform it.
• The present obsession with media delivery systems may help our media people locate a certain type of person more easily, but is never going to provide the spark of brilliance on how to motivate this person. Understanding motivation still comes from the brains of talented people who somehow know what the right combination of ingredients is to motivate a certain type of person in a certain category.
• If you advertise today, your business is not going to suddenly be successful tomorrow or next week. But if you advertise every day, next year your business probably will get better, and healthier, and stronger.
• If you look at the leading brands in mainstream categories, the likelihood is that they have one thing in common — they advertise, and they do it a lot.
• We have forgotten that some of the best advertising ideas weren’t the result of algorithms and analyses. They were the result of someone sitting on the potty with a yellow pad and coming up with a great idea.
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• According to Tetlock, experts who are most often wrong are those who have an ideological commitment to a “big idea.” “They tended to have one big, beautiful idea that they loved to stretch, sometimes to the breaking point. They tended to be articulate and very persuasive as to why their idea explained everything. The media often love (them.)”
• You can always tell who the half-bright marketing promoters are because they, too, attribute deep meaning to every random marketing phenomenon.
• Of course, this does not mean there are no heavy category or brand users who are highly brand loyal. But in general, the idea that heavy users in a category or of a brand are more loyal than light users is not just mistaken, it is dangerous.
• The idea that your success is dependent upon your customers becoming deeply emotionally attached to your brand is a delusion. Consumers are promiscuous. Most successful brands have a customer profile that is a mile wide and an inch deep. They’re just not that into you.
• As new technology is adopted by everyone, what starts as a competitive advantage often quickly evolves into just another cost of doing business.
• Assume everyone is faking it. Nobody knows a thing about advertising. All the rules are bullshit. There are a few people who can make good ads. That’s all there is.
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• It is true that, all things being equal, people will default to their favorite brand. But every intelligent marketer knows that her competitors are up late every night working to make sure that all things are never equal.
• Creativity is the ability to be interesting, funny, or different. It’s easy to be interesting, funny or different at lunch. It’s a thousand times more difficult to do it on a page.
• I don’t mind being wrong but I do mind being timid. Naughty words have a use — they remove any hint of ambiguity.