Marketers are Evil

My wife is always telling me how evil marketers are.  She might be right, but that’s no reason to resort to name calling! She might be referring to marketing trickery with points programs or some other loyalty surrogate.  The real power isn’t in marketing trickery, it’s in marketing sorcery!

While working a summer construction job in college, I was grabbing lunch and struck up a conversation with the owner’s wife.  She was a very nice lady with a bit of a hippie look.  The conversation was pleasant and then she asked me what I was going to school to study.  As soon as I mentioned marketing, her demeanor changed and she looked at me in a demeaning way and said “oh…. so you’re the guy that, when I’m thirsty is going to make me want to buy a Coke.”  In one of those rare moments when time slows and you dig down to find just the right thing to say, I laughed it off assuring her, “oh no… not at all… I’m the guy that’s going to make you thirsty in the first place.”

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the right thing to say to her (she didn’t think it was as clever as I did).  It did, however, identify an underlying power of marketing and a way to separate classes of marketers.  Some marketers will research their way to addressing a need (Oh you’re thirsty?  Well, here’s a Coke), while other marketers create the need.  How often have you heard somebody say, “I need my iPhone,” “I can’t live without my Dunkin’, “I need chocolate.”  Okay… maybe it was you saying those things, but at the end of the day we need air, food, and shelter, not Apple products.

So, can you create a perceived need for your product or service?  Can you make people wonder if it’s possible to live without you?  It’s not an easy thing to do.  It means leading customers instead of following them.  Steve Jobs detested market research.  Henry Ford is reported to have said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”  These great innovators created the perceived need for an iPod and a car. Jobs’ motivation for the iPod was primarily that he wanted one!

How can your brand lead?  How can people become so passionate about your brand, it becomes a need in their mind?  Besides the money, do you need your brand?  Are you passionate about it?  For all the character flaws of Ford and Jobs, they absolutely loved what they did.  They needed to make those products for us and for themselves.

Ask the hard brand questions and you’ll be well on your way to changing your part of the world.