MarketSense

How Stretching the Truth and White Lies Hurt Your Product and Your Business

The edict came down from on high.   New rules were in place for the presentation of benchmarks and the validation of marketing claims.    Marketing had to clean up its act or the company risked fines and other legal consequences.    Those rules, instituted many years ago by my employer, were eye-opening for me.    I was a young marketer and I welcomed the idea that ethics were a code that all marketers lived by.

Through the years I learned that marketing ethics like any other ethics ultimately rely on the individual.   Corporate management plays a part in our ethics to the extent that they clearly define our ethical boundaries and then hold us accountable to those rules.    In practice, I have rarely seen consequences for bad practice along the way.  However, the consequences are there and they are real, we may just not recognize them.

Marketing is always on the spot to present our products in the "best light".   Sometimes, we haven’t done our homework and find the “best light” elusive.  Other times, we aren’t given much to work with by engineering.   The temptation is to stretch the truth, to tell little white lies about our products’ capabilities.   We try to make our products look bigger and better than they are.   And after we are done with the product messaging, yet another layer of truth-stretching is added by sales.   The result is that our product is melded into the “ideal solution” for any prospective customer who comes along.   

Management is patting us on the back for a job well done.  After all, getting lots of new customers is good, isn’t it?   Not always.   When your product isn’t a good fit for a customer, it creates a lot of undue hardship across both the company’s and the customer’s organizations.  I’ve seen engineering and support work overtime trying to make a force fit work.  I’ve seen bad fit customers become the two ton gorilla on the company’s back.   The result is angst, lots of angst.  Even worse, there is the loss of a whole lot of productive time which could have been used implementing valuable new features and obtaining good fit customers.   

Perhaps the most gullible converts to truth-stretched marketing is the company itself.   We all would like to think that the baby (product) doesn’t have warts.    In my experience, the baby’s producers are particularly blind to the baby’s warts.   Add marketing and the baby has now been cosmetically altered so that the warts are no longer visible.   It is not popular for marketing to speak the truth about their products internally.  Most management doesn’t want to hear the truth.   They say that marketing is complaining.   They say that marketing isn‘t a team player.  They say that marketers aren’t smart enough to market the product.    As a marketer, you feel that your job is on the line when you tell the truth about the product.  Unfortunately, everyone loses when management takes this attitude.  With this organizational blindness, the opportunities for real product improvement are never realized.    The organization lives under the pressure of an inferior product.

Bad marketing ethics eventually catch up with you.   They hurt your product by diverting valuable resources to force fit solutions.   They hurt the company by disguising the real problems with the company’s offerings.  In my next blog entry, I’ll talk about how bad marketing ethics hurt you, the marketer.  It is a jungle out there.  Be courageous and do the right thing.

Getting the Team Involved in Building the Messaging

I recently participated with a marketing team on a messaging exercise.   The goal of the exercise was to profile the target audience in a way that would help tease out key messages to use when marketing the product.   The way that the process was run helped utilize the unique perspectives of every member of the team while at the same time producing a wealth of results.   I thought that I would share some of the elements that made this exercise a success.

1.       The approach for the meeting was laid out at the beginning to establish the common goal.   This helped those who were not familiar with the exercise understand what we were doing and what its outcome would be.  Everyone on the team would benefit from that outcome.

2.       The approach used to develop the messaging methodically built the messaging in layers.   

a.       The first layer to be developed was the target audience profile.   This profile answered the question: what do we know about the members of the target audience?  The characteristics broke down into demographics, psychographics and business traits.

b.      The second layer identified what mattered most to the target audience.  This layer was specifically focused on the daily concerns and interests of the target audience without respect to our company or our product.

c.       The third layer selected the key selling propositions of our offering.   Both product benefits and features were considered.   Though preceded by two customer-focused layers, this layer was intended to be a brain dump of what the team saw as value in the product.

d.      The fourth layer associated the key selling propositions with the customer “care about”s.   This is where we started to see the real benefits of the methodical approach.   It became easy to identify what features and values were going to be important to the customer.

3.       All members of the team were given a voice.   The team was made of both marketing people and technical people familiar with the product.   Each team member was given an opportunity to contribute to each layer.   Each person was given their own time to voice their input which made them feel valued.  Early on, the whole team saw how not only their contribution but the insights of the others made the results so much more complete. 

This is a great team-building exercise.   Because our knowledge of our customers is constantly being updated, holding messaging exercises like this on a regular basis help ensure fresh ideas are being fed and developed in your marketing messages.