The Marketing Plaza

Recently I was asked my definition of marketing. I hate the question, even though it’s a very legitimate thing to ask a marketing person.  There are so many definitions and for a field that specializes in making things memorable and compelling, none of the definitions are memorable or compelling.

Finally, I’ve condensed my personal definition into something easier for me to remember.  Marketing, I said, is “Honing the brand and expanding its reach.”  That’s it.  I have longer definitions that deal with company vision, but they get too convoluted.

Bottom line – it’s about honing the brand and expanding reach. Sure, in expanding reach, there should be a way to monetize the brand – if that’s your goal. If you’re running for president, the goal is to motivate votes.  Either way, the goal is to create audience, action, or affection (loyalty).

OK, so the real definition of marketing is that which “hones the brand and expands its reach to create audience, action or affection.”  The Three A’s!

The problem is the definition keeps getting longer and less memorable. I recently completed the audio book “Made to Stick.” I had read it once before, but it’s a great book to revisit for marketing, editorial, educational and advertising types. The book discusses how to make ideas stick from campaign slogans to mathematical formulas.

The key, according to the authors, Chip and Dan Heath, is storytelling. None of us, it turns out, remembers data or love facts. We love and remember stories. But sometimes definitions are required. When your CEO or CFO asks “Why is marketing important,” you need to be able to answer – quickly and succinctly.  Our inability as a discipline to do just that has been just one reason for the demise of many of much needed marketing groups.

In effectively telling company stories, we marketing types frequently fail in one key area. We neglect to tell our own stories – how marketing has functioned as part of solutions. It’s the classic shoemaker’s children going without shoes.  Going forward, as marketing people, one of our key goals must be promoting our own proof of performance. Our performance as well as our very existence on the team is key to a company’s long-term survival.

Content is king, but too much content can be like too much e-mail- spam.  The key is to provide content of value and in enough quantity that it can be digested.

Recently I was at a newspaper conference where we evaluated how well various papers were engaging in the social media world. The irony is that no one has better or more content than newspapers – so much so that many tweets, Facebook posts and blogs take you to various newspaper stories around the country.   So what are newspapers doing wrong?

I think it comes down to two key things:

1. They provide too much content. A news stream is almost like a wire service firing off story after story until hundreds of stories are posted almost within the hour that the news has gone to press.  As a reader, I’d much prefer perhaps one story an hour, or the story of the day, or the story that’s the funkiest, or even a story from the food section, rather than every story being printed in the main section that day.

2. They are too automated.  Precisely because they have so much content, and because they won’t invest in staff or resources to enter the online arena, the newspapers I’ve seen have automated the process.  Too much of any good thing is too much, and the same is true of automation.

I follow social media sites to get the best ideas a business or marketing guru has to offer. I don’t want every line from every book, or every chapter capsulized.  I want a tidbit for the day that I can remember, think about and take with me on my own business travels.  I also follow a person because of the personal touch.

When the tweets put out by a paper are so highly automated that they have no humor, no irony, no personal touch—well, then I might as well be following CNN.  Even if the news is local, I want some sense that a person has decided to put this particular news item out on the internet because it’s special and not just one item out of a thousand for the day.

Social media is best done consistently and regularly, but is not better served by being over served.  Ironically as newspapers moan that their copy is being stolen for free by the Googles of the world, they have entered the social media arena without editing themselves.  And, editing is their strength!

Yes, give some content for free, but learn the art of the tease.  Stop flooding the market with all the news all the time.  Go back to the art of the headline and tell me what’s most important, most humorous, most worthwhile for today rather than flooding me with everything. It’s just too much information.