Truth in Marketing? Or Not

by: Brian Lawley

Two of the most basic principles in marketing is that: 1) You must never insult your potential customer and the second ..) Marketing you must be congruent (ie you can stretch the truth a little but you can not cross the line into a place too far from reality). For this article I will use a well known company (and preferred) to illustrate why it is both so important.

Many years ago when I still worked at Apple as the MacOS Human Interface Product Manager I remember talking with Chris Espinosa, one of the first Apple employees (and still exist). We're talking about Apple's latest advertising campaign at the moment in which he bluntly put the user's PC, said that they had made "a wrong choice."

That is a hard hitting campaign that includes a good many facts to support this argument, but we both agreed that the new intelligence insulting your potential customers is NOT the way to convince them to switch. After all, customers have made the decision to go with the Windows platform, and say they have made a stupid decision is not going to give them an ego stroke or ammunition companies that they need to consider a switch.



Enter Apple's latest campaign, which I believe is not only insulting potential customers, but also unlawful marketing alignment.

Now before I go any further Do not get me wrong - I am a Mac fan, and I believe that the OS and hardware integration by providing a great experience. I'm using a dual-processor Mac OSX in my music studio and it gives great performance and results, with very few problems.

Saying that, I use Windows to work with clients, and since I left Apple in 1995 (Windows 95 days delivered). Using Windows on my ThinkPad to provide me with a very productive environment - as business users it is my tool of choice.

Now you know where I stand (I'm all about using the best tools to get the job done quickly), let's look at Apple's current "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads.

Psychological first impressions of this ad means that PC users are not competent geek and misinformation. Mac Men, on the other hand, is a young smart, cool guy who clearly knows described as "truth." This forms an instant conflict in the minds of anyone who is relatively happy to use a PC - that want to be labeled as a geeky guy? But worse than this, the Apple ads cross the line marketing alignment.

If you are big enough after you watch a few ads and you quickly catch Apple in the ad is too far away from contact with reality to be believed. Once again, one of the basic principles of good advertising and marketing is that it must be fairly congruent with reality - if you stretch too far people will be caught, your credibility will be shot and you will not be considered as an option.

I could go through and argue with the point-the point of what Apple is trying to get in each ad (fewer viruses, run a second operating system, etc.), but that's not the point of this article. Some of their points are really true, but for me I knew in my gut that describes their experience with the Windows versus Mac is too excessive and not in accordance with my truth. And I must tell you, as an educated user who knows little about the use of both operating systems in a real world environment I felt humiliated and flip the channel or mute the sound when I see their ad.

Maybe the masses do not feel like this and will not understand. But if the mass of asking people knowledgeable and open-minded for recommendations on what to buy, the campaign could actually fail. It is quite possible that the ad would only ring true to the Mac faithful.

So what's the moral of this story? When you create your core marketing messages and campaigns if you want to win the hearts and minds of potential customers and convert them into your solution, your marketing claim must match reality closely enough. Do not claim to have features that you have not yet worked. Do not tell prospects what you can do something that can not (because they WILL find you can not). Do not claim your competitors can not do something that everyone knows they can. And most importantly, do not insult your intelligence prospects.




Article Source:
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/marketing/article_5769.shtml