Articles Posted in Bad Marketing

This video spoofs the phony voice of marketers and advertising. It is “office safe” so don’t worry about the volume. Enjoy.

Does your marketing sound like this? You might have been able to get away with this 15 years ago but since social media has allowed people to opt out this kind of insincere over-dramatization you need to be careful.

For education publishers you also need to remember that many teachers teach critical thinking skills – if you are talking down to them they won’t react well.

Bad marketing comes in two flavors. There is poorly executed marketing that no one notices. Then there is insincere, dishonest, and misleading marketing that everyone notices. The first kind is a waste of your money, the second kind gives marketers a bad name.

I’ve written elsewhere on finding a good target market, selecting a winning brand promise, and engaging in conversational Web 2.0 marketing. If you do those things well you can largely avoid execution error.

Today we focus on an example of the second kind that was so breathtakingly awful I had to backtrack and take a picture of it.

Advertising isn’t working as well as it used to. In an age of information overload people are tuning out distractions as a matter of survival.

Here are two visuals to help make this point.

1. It is far more important to be found when someone is looking these days than to be visible when they are just scanning. To visualize this look at the graphic below