Whatever your role in marketing and advertising, it can really be a big role and you can’t escape a fact. An absolute fact that you, or anyone else in the industry, cannot deny.
You are a consumer.
We are all consumers. But we forgot about it.
It’s you. The one sitting across the hall from you. The CEO of your company. So hello. You buy stuff. You go to the store. You select the items carefully. It doesn’t matter if those stores sell things for a dollar, or high-end shoe boutiques on Rodeo Drive. You make money, you spend money, so, you eat.
Still, this obvious fact is something that will escape the vast majority of people in this business when it comes time to create advertising and marketing campaigns.
Suddenly, the paradigm shift from consumer to marketer drives the common symptoms and experience out of the room. This is when words like 360 degree approach, contextual marketing, disruptors, hyperlocal and sociologist enter the room. It’s usually too bad to play “buzzword bingo” in the agency and marketing industry around the world.
But showing these sharp words to the average person at a grocery store and they will see the list as it is written in Klingon.
Everyone begins to study the population spreadsheets, and in depth in PowerPoint presentations, “showing maps and maps of the target audience.”
You put your head down and write a few notes, starting with the image of this unity.
A 31-45 year old male, with a low middle income, a mixed race background and a wife and 2.4 children. This person does not exist.
Do not create faceless people and statistics marketing
2.4 There are no such things as children. The 31-45 year old male has no such thing. It’s all nonsense written for creative tips and marketing presentations because it’s actually much easier to target a wide range of people than to focus on one real person.
Still, every day marketing and advertising campaigns have created this compassionate goal in mind. Campaigns are designed to connect courageous and real people, and they come out of meetings taking creative ideas to give a thousand cuts to death.
“Our data shows that people want to see people dancing in commercials. And there’s got a big lift for talking kids and animals.
This is not the thinking of the consumer. This is marketing hyperbole. There are so many bad ads out there, crippled by the round of countless customer meetings and changes. Then, they are thrown out of the sea, those who are truly alive, and die a severe death at the hands of the real consumer.
Not only that, the media buys these bad ads, even though they are consumers, not thinking like them. So you get 30-60 second pre-roll ads on YouTube video. As a consumer, it drives us crazy. The same people who buy places like this, or countless other “cynical” ads, will be just like the consumer screaming away from them. They hate them. They no longer have a marketing mindset, but a consumer mindset because they hate it. Think about this. Good money to buy ads that someone, themselves, hates to see. I know they can break it. It is very exciting. But, they think they are “not a media consumer” as they are called a “media buyer”.
This. Is. To. Stop.
Like a consumer. As always.
When Gordon Ramsay cooks, he always considers the audience. He thinks of himself first as his food consumer and second as his cook.
In the opening episode of British Kidney Nightmares, he is surprised by the food he serves. A small plate of fashionable French food, in a north-eastern English city, people were begging for good old-fashioned bass, hot tubs and other traditional eyebrows.
The young chef was thinking of himself as a chef. He wanted to show off his skills and prepare the food he wanted to cook. But he didn’t think like the people he worked for. If he had really been in the consumer city he would not have tried to force that food on them.