Direct marketing is not only part of the "TV/industrial complex" in general, but also guilty of "TV thinking" in particular, according to marketing guru Seth Godin.
“TV thinking says I’m a marketer, I have power,” he said in his keynote speech at DMA05 in Atlanta. “I can interrupt whomever I want, whenever I want because I’ve got money. I can call you at dinner, I can send e-mail, I can buy magazine ads. The entire model of this industry, the model of Proctor and Gamble or any company we grew up with is this: Spend a nickel. Make six cents. Repeat.”
The problem, as Godin sees it, is that the consumer now has all the power and can turn off those messages whenever he wants, through TiVo, unsubscribes and the Do Not Call registry.
Meanwhile the marketplace is cluttered with products that are largely “good enough”, he says. Coca-Cola Japan introduces a new product every 21 days just to rise above the herd. But that approach just creates more clutter.
“You’re spammers, each and every one of you,” Godin said. ‘You’re sending me unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk in a format I don’t want to get about a product I’m not interested in and won’t have time to look at. And you’re hoping to persuade enough people to buy so you can go buy more stamps, or call more people, or buy more inserts, or run more ads. And the problem is, spam doesn’t work like it used to.”
Instead of trying to sell everybody something average, marketers should be talking about something remarkable to the small subset of prospects who want to listen, Godin said. And that will lead them to tell their friends about it too.
Godin said it’s the difference between American Airlines, which said, “The ads don’t work—let’s stop serving peanuts,” and JetBlue, which said, “The ads don’t work—let’s play by a different set of rules.”
Rather than selling, marketers need to be storytellers. “Marketing has a new name: engineering,” he said. “All marketers are in the fashion business. They’re selling you something you want, not something you need.”
After all, he pointed out, bottled water sales are going through the roof. “Meanwhile, thirst has remained relatively flat. People don’t buy bottled water because they’re thirsty. They could drink from the tap for that. They do it because of the way it makes them feel.”
