KEY THOUGHT: There is a LOT of bad marketing out there and the root cause, frankly, is there are a lot of bad marketers in management roles. Consumers are shopping smarter and they never forgive brands that ignore their needs or treat them like they are replaceable.
Yesterday I spent an hour on the phone with a journalist for a leading business magazine. The subject was “is bad marketing causing a loss in CPG’s?” My answer was “yes”.
How many time have you seen an ad on TV and said: “what in hell were they thinking?”. Today’s big data-driven marketers have lost touch with consumers. To them, research is used to validate what they should already know.
Want another example? On LinkedIn Gary Lee still has thousands of people who worship his body odor. Despite the fact that he has never successfully worked at a consumer products company and told us all to drink the social media Kool-aid this self-promotional, self-branding spotlight hog is followed by people who are too dumb to think for themselves.
The corner office people are starting to question the value of the marketing dollars that they spend. Coke tried to tell us that their soda sales were rejuvenated by the new Diet Coke launch, but they forgot to tell millennials who are not drinking soda anymore. How many marketing dollars were lost on this launch? Shouldn’t the people at Coke have known that soda is an unhealthy product?
Overworked product managers continue to waste time on wordsmithed PowerPoints rather than getting out of the office to watch and learn. Too many marketing executives still search for their time in the sun so they add another bullet point on resumes and become legends in their own minds.
Finally, there is the “business” of marketing. Antiquated processes that lead to back-to-back meetings while consumers purchase store brands.
Great marketing is part science, part instinct and part understanding your audience via listening tools. Big data is just another deck in your inbox. Too many brands are becoming irrelevant and it’s going to continue.
