Success is bound to go out the window when your marketing content is nothing special.
‘Meh’ is the response you can expect from your customers and prospects.
Because if your messaging is obligated to protocols, rules and proprieties, people aren’t exactly quick to respond.
Maybe because they’ve seen it all before.
Isn’t that true for you, personally?
As a consumer don’t you find yourself loosing interest when a brand’s content is indifferent?
Which is why marketers worried about their problems should also worry about their solutions.
You can gain a lot by looking back on what you’ve done. ‘Was that the best possible solution? Really?’
Facebook went through the post mortem thing and ditched their ‘Chairs’ commercial. http://bit.ly/1cZHtuI
They got rid of this corporate spot as it was judged wanting. People found it confusing. Or hated it.
Many just laughed at it as this parody shows. http://bit.ly/1zQx4OB
Home Depot had second thoughts, as well.
One of their tweets came back to bite them in the arse.
It was the ‘Which Drummer is Not Like the Others’ message. http://bit.ly/1us4psc
Ill-advised and dumb. You have to wonder, who approved work like this in the first place.
For content, you often get work that’s judged not to be ‘bad’. But that doesn’t make it automatically good … what’s acceptable is far short of exceptional.
Another term for that is ‘mediocre’.
Still, one thing’s for sure.
There’s always a better version of your brand story out there. You just have to get your ad agency working to find it.
You could do worse for a New Year’s resolution than ‘brilliance is compulsory’. Share that with your creative people.
You never know what discoveries and improvements lie ahead until you start looking for them.
Why do this?
Because it’s risky to run ordinary stuff … the kind of content you would ignore as a typical online surfer.
So if your agency presents an idea that’s so different it seems risky, you may be on to a good thing.
If nobody has done it before and it’s on strategy that’s promising.
After all, fresh and imaginative thinking is fatal to being ordinary. It’s the way to begin to own your category with a voice that’s engaging.
A CEO we know had a memorable expression about risk.
He said, ‘Risk is a bastard. Without it we could all go home at 5PM’.
More to that …
With better content you might even be able to slip out the door at 4:45.
Share with us. How do you go about lowering your risk of investing precious dollars in marketing and advertising? Leave your comment in the box below. Thanks for reading Whybetonto.com, Steve Ulin