Marketing to the “Inner Animal”

It amazes me to see so much dry, ineffective marketing out there, much of it brought to market with large budgets and huge teams of professionals executing on it. And really, it’s quite easy to fall into groupthink when so many cooks are at play in the proverbial kitchen.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying you can’t execute effective marketing messaging, campaigns, etc. with a team-based approach. Quite the contrary, I’m actually saying a couple of things.

First, marketers simply fall into bad habits, at least those of us who are well-trained in the first place. Probably the worst bad habit is sitting on your laurels while new techniques and media emerge, assuming that you know “enough” based on experience and gut. With the pace of change and availability of unprecedented communications vehicles, that is, at best, naive.

Second, to bastardize a quote by Rodney Dangerfield, “marketers don’t get no respect” in a lot of cases. With tight budgets, a prevalence of micromanaging executives, and the folks I mentioned in the previous paragraph all playing roles in our success or failure, it’s easy to just agree to a bad idea in the sake of meeting a dreadline or getting another arduous piece of busy work off your plate.

You could just say, “Well, said marketers just need to get ‘back to the basics’.” But what the heck are the basics? The Four P’s, which were already outdated when I last took a Marketing course in the late 90s? Mass media driven advertising? What is this, 1975?

And don’t tell me the answer is to put in more hours, because quantity has always been and is still inferior to quality.

We need a better way to manage all this. As much as humans like to elevate themselves to some superior level to other living organisms on this planet, the hard truth is that we’re just another species of animal. Sure, we can talk, walk upright, surf the internet, and do a slew of other things that are only possible with our advanced brain structure. But we all still have basic needs like safety, food, shelter…y’know, all that stuff at the bottom of Maslow’s Triangle.

I just spent the better part of three days in Las Vegas, NV for Interop 2010, managing the set up for Anue Systems and then manning the booth for most of the first day. In my career, I’ve managed many dozens of trade shows. Most of those were for small companies, and across the various  companies we consistently struggled to drive sufficient booth traffic with various giveaways, in-booth talent, live demos,  contests…you name it; we probably tried it.