I have oftentimes said through this blog, as well as via other means, that the more technology is advancing, the more intrusive, not to mention abusive, marketing professionals are becoming.
From the spreading of the printing press in the 1500s, to the advent of nation-wide telephone systems in the 1900s, to mass e-mail marketing in the 1990s and to the social media explosion of our times, it’s as if this world is focused around the marketeers’ needs!
To be perfectly fair, you cannot sell if no one knows what you have for sale and as a customer, you would like to know what’s available to you prior to making a decision. But the problem is, that as a customer, you don’t need this information to be offered to you anymore. If and when you feel like you need more information on something, you should be able to hop on a website and be informed instantly about whatever you need to know. Some will claim that traditional advertising can also act as a form of credibility: “We have enough money to spend on ads, therefore people prefer us, therefore our product is good and you should buy it.” Spending money on any traditional means when the digital age has been around for a decade now however, is old stuff that do not impress any more. Customized Internet adds are the future for anyone that is bent on promoting a product and I know that this no big news to anyone.
Unfortunately, Internet advertising platforms have made the exact same mistake that their printing, radio and TV ancestors did: They lacked moderation. Too many ads made people push back and now all of us are running ad blockers. Not only that, but marketeers didn’t learn either from past experiences: Internet ads are as low quality, as TV, radio and paper ads were in the past – Too noisy, too flashy, too badly written.
And so, we have come to a point where the only effective forms of promotion, are the Google search and social media ads. I am sure someone will soon develop an adblocker that blocks them too.
I have an academic book on marketing in front of me as I write this. Believe it or not, it is the exact same, old stuff that I was taught during my MBA studies more than a decade ago(!) plus some chapters on social media. No wonder why marketeers and promotional platform managers alike keep making the same mistakes!
My view is that the best kind of marketing is good customer service. Traditional promotion is nowadays more of a white noise than anything else. Good customer service however, increases retention which is infinitely less expensive than new customer acquisition. The argument that you need a good marketing department to help you expand, because “if you are not growing you are dying” is as uninformed as a three-year old’s opinion on nuclear physics. And this is because customer retention creates word of mouth which in turn increases the chances of new customer acquisition. Furthermore, word of mouth doesn’t create to the customer the uneasy feeling of being violated.
Lazy people think that technological advances can be used as a means of reducing touch by marketing more intensely and leaving customer service to automated assistants. I think technological advances offer the best return, when used at the exact opposite way to what I just described in the previous sentence.