The Ugly Truth About Marketing
A few weeks ago I tweeted . “No amount of great marketing can fix a broken product” and it got retweeted like crazy. As it seemed to strike a chord within some of you all I thought I’d expand on the thought.
There are many things that marketing can help your business or organisation achieve. Great marketing is the one of the raw ingredients in the fuel that makes the great businesses and organisations get to where they want to go.
But there is nothing great marketing can do if your:
Customer service is bad
I remember trying to buy my new 4GS iPhone. I tried and tried to call the local Telstra store there was no dial tone. (Yes. Really) So I thought I’d call Telstra direct and they transferred me to the store straight away and again there was no dial tone. I called Telstra again and told them that there was a problem and that I couldn’t get through. The person didn’t seem to care and said that their phone line was down. I even told them that was planning on buying a phone that day. Nope. Still didn’t really matter. No alternatives were provided. Nothing else was offered.
Here I was ready to sign over good size phone contract and they couldn’t even recommend an alternative store. I wanted a Telstra contract because their coverage is by far the best and their prices have come down. I was ready to move from Optus.
Telstra can advertise all they want with their lovely new campaign but if they can’t do the simple things why would someone believe their marketing?
Your receptionist or call centre is your organisations best relationship manager with the outside world. What are you doing to help them understand that?
Product doesn’t live up to expectations
Do you remember the ‘new coke’ It was supposed to be better. Coke’s market share had dropped to an all time low and in an effort to reverse the trend in market share Coke developed a new formula. They focus tested it and got positive response, yet there was a small 10-15% of respondents that didn’t like what Coke said they would do. What happened is history. The new Coke could never live up to the high expectations. It’s marketing could never turn this pigs ear of a product launch into a silk purse.
Treat people poorly
If you treat your supply chain badly and screw them for every penny. Coles and Woolworths here in Australia are very quickly gaining the reputation for destroying the national food basket.
Apple is also suffering the same fate. They clearly have issues with their supply chain and the word is getting out. It impacts the brand. The brand that is cool and hip is very quickly turning into being perceived by some as big brother because of issues like these.
Qantas recently had a large industrial relations battle with their unions. While they may have won the war with the union, they forgot that they are a retail business with customers. They made a bad call by treat their customers like pawns so they can win their industrial relations dispute with their workforce.
No amount of great marketing can fix a that.
The ugly truth about marketing
The truth is that great marketing cannot fix a bad business or organisation if it’s broken down or bad. Marketing is often treated like a mechanic. People think that all they have to do is haul their organisation into the marketing garage and let the marketing mechanics do the work and bring the organisation back to full functioning order.
Some businesses and organisations literally expect marketing to act like this. They expect it to recondition them from the precariously poor position they have put themselves into. Wrong. Good marketing cannot fix this. Even brilliant marketing can’t spin this away.
What examples of disconnect have you experienced in marketing?
I see it a lot where I’m working right now. The marketing department is releasing a new brand and redoing all our marketing strategies, but internally, nothing has really changed. Students still leave various offices frustrated. They still have the bad nicknames for the school, and many don’t even consider it a real college. Not to mention many departments mistreat their part time or support help. Branding can only do so much. If you treat your customers and employees poorly, your business will suffer. Great post, Steve!
uh oh! what can be done to make real change happen?
I would say marketing is fundamentally a part of a whole organisation’s operations, not just “a department”. Phone answering, customer service, supply chain management – marketing applies to all of them (which I think any marketing textbook would try and emphasize.
The issues above arise when organisations don’t view marketing that way; and M/dept’s operate solely as a “good ideas factory” trying to influence a company’s overall impression in the marketplace, but without the strategic integration of marketing-thinking into the whole organisations operations.
A good example I can think of is the Staples office products chain in the US. Before re-branding (a few years ago now) they completely overhauled the way customer service and ranging in-store were handled, so when their big relaunch occurred the (other) marketing elements like logo and advertising campaigns etc matched with the customer experience in-store.
-M
Thanks Mike, some great thoughts there.
You are so right, marketing occurs in and at every level of an organisation.
Everything communicates something!
hey Steve,
I’m going to play the apple fanboy card here and question your lumping of Apple in with the supermarkets and Qantas. Especially after your para above indicates that this issue didn’t prevent you going for an iPhone…
What this, I think, means is that a great product and great marketing can overcome deficiencies elsewhere… There is perhaps a venn diagram to be made from this post, where a few overlaps produce a functional, but not optimal outcome, but the ideal is for your brand, product, and marketing to all overlap…
Hey Nathan,
Play the card by all means! Yes I still bought the phone. But here’s the thing, the perception of Apple is changing from the renegade and maverick of the tech world to corporate be-moth. They are no longer the little guy and that means they will always come under more criticism on IR issues.
I’d probably agree that great brands can overcome deficiencies,in the short term at least. But brands, like all of us in relationships have ‘relational credit’ with consumers which means we will give them slack sometimes depending on the issue, but each time something bad happens some of that credit is withdrawn. Eventually if they aren’t depositing in they will go bankrupt! There is a line in the sand in any relationship where we all say enough is enough.
One word: Telstra. x