Why Is Marketing So Selfish? 🤷‍♂️

Go-To-Market Shenanigans (#003)
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Today, we are going to discuss the following:

• Marketing 😳: Why Marketing Is Selfish. (But it doesn’t have to be!)

• Advertising 🎥: Our favorite ad from the Super Bowl. (*hint: it didn’t even air!)

• Product ⚙️: It’s so hard to make shoes different. (But these are just built differently, literally.)

• Health & Wellness 💪: I’m Becoming Obsessed With Laird Hamilton Inspired Fitness Things. (This is going to be a rabbit hole…)

• Links For The Week 🛜: This app changed my life. (My GPA could’ve used this.)

• Tunes 🎶: Flow State Enhancing Track. (Give it a go for your following flow)

• Wisdom 💭: “Meglio Soli che male accompagnati.” (Some wise words to live by.)

Marketing 📈
Why Is Marketing So Selfish?

First off, this giph is hilarious.

Now that we’ve taken a second to appreciate the humor of the internet let’s jump into this week’s topic, SELFLESS MARKETING.

This will be a topic I go rather deep on for the foreseeable future; why, you ask? Marketing is supposed to be for the people, to give them what they want, feel something they’ve been longing for, educate, entertain, and provide a desired escape from modern-day reality where we can live to be the best version of ourselves in our mind.

So what’s the primary issue? To cut straight to the point, the majority of brands are selfish.

In college, we always talked about “providing value.” A buzzword quickly followed by “algorithm” and “ROAS,” which were often used out of context but buzzed the word hard enough to encompass a confident head nod from a few slightly engaged classmates hiding behind their laptops from across the room. I digress… that statement provided no value; see what I did there?

Although I didn’t provide any value with the paragraph above, I told a story you could hopefully follow along with and visualize to some degree. Imagine if I offered some value while telling a story; that’d be pretty engaging, wouldn’t it? Well, if you’re still here, I’m hopefully about to take this whole value-backed escapade thing for a freaking ride.

Think about going on a date with a significant someone you are interested in. They’re way out of your league, but they’ve got something you’re willing to shoot your shot at: looks & a personality. Did I mention this special someone is way out of your league? So you take them on a date, ask them a few questions, then BOOM! The greatest thing that could ever happen happens. That significant someone starts talking about THEIR favorite movie series of all time, The Batman Trilogy, obviously, which is also YOUR favorite trilogy of all time. Congratulations, you have found common ground. Your likelihood of scoring a second date has just become a reality.

So imagine what would happen if you went on this date and never asked this person questions. Would you have gotten anywhere if you weren’t the slightest bit vulnerable and shared some interests? Would you have found common ground if you hadn’t asked the right questions or, more importantly, listened to what that special someone had to say? Probably not.

What’s interesting about modern-day marketing tactics is we think it’s valuable to talk about ourselves, our products, and our brand without anybody asking… it’s selfish.

So what if we flipped the script? What if we made it a point to understand how our product or service changes people's lives? Have we sought to understand customer perspectives/interests? Actively search for common ground amongst our buyers so we can relate with one another? Teach skills that make our product experience better? Wow, that was a lot of thought in one paragraph 😅.

In simple terms, we’d have a strategy. Now, humor me one step further: what if this strategy was delivered as a story?

Marketing is a conversation, and the future of marketing is interactive. Consumers want to be marketed “with” not “to.”

Focus your marketing efforts on creating an interactive experience. This experience can be digital, face-to-face, or in a retail store; I mean, it can be a bloody chatbot or a survey for all I care. Just do something to add a personal touchpoint and make it a priority to learn about your customers. While you’re at it, make this experience as entertaining as possible. If you turn it into a story and position sponsors, customers, and other forms of inspiration as your focal point, congratulations, you’ve started telling a brand story.

And the funny thing about a brand story is it never ends. The best brands have a consistent theme, provide a reliable level of value from a utility and an emotional standpoint, and tell the same story for generations.

So, please stop saying posting a product hype reel on social media is a strategy. Yes, I’m calling out that marketing expert telling you you will fail if you don’t adopt “x”. We get it: your brand is sick, but what the customer is really thinking is, “What’s in it for me?” if they even made it past 8 seconds, which, by the way, is the average attention span. And I think that stat is generous.

In the effort to leave everything on a high note because life’s too short for sorrow, everybody has a story. Telling a story is hard, but don’t be afraid to try new things. Failing at a strategy is an investment, an investment in learning that that strategy doesn’t work. Some great questions to ask yourself are:

1. What are my customers going to be curious about after this campaign?

2. What are my customers going to learn after this campaign?

3. How are my customers going to take action on this campaign?

4. How do I leave my customers wanting more? (cliffhanger)

So this leads me to my next tangent, “How do we market ‘with’ not ‘to’ consumers?”

But you’ll have to subscribe and tune in next week for that. 😜