Don’t Know Much About Marketing…

One of the most aggravating things to a writer is that most people don’t understand what it is that we do – and therefore don’t value us. When I was a professional resume writer, for example, many people who would never dream of asking a doctor to cure them for free or a carpenter to build them something for free or a taxi driver to take them somewhere for free would assume that I’d just love to write something for them gratis. In some ways, though, the misconceptions that the marketing people go through are even worse. Many people don’t understand the difference between marketing and sales in the first place, and even people who should know better seem to think (for reasons that escape me) that there’s nothing to developing and implementing a brilliant and innovative marketing campaign. Which still doesn’t explain how anyone at Toyota thought that an Internet promotion in which you can anyone you want receive a series of threatening (and creepy) emails from an (apparent) stalker was a good idea…

You can read about the story on the Threat Level column over at the Wired online site, but the basic idea was the Toyota set up a website where you could sign up anyone you wanted to be stalked by any one of five creepy and scary online characters – the idea being that people in the key demographic for the Matrix automobile (males in their 20s) love this sort of practical joke, and would appreciate the company’s hip, edgy sense of humor when it was finally revealed to them that they’d been had. Unfortunately, almost anyone (even a small child) could probably have figured out that if you can register anyone you want, someone would use the prank system to sent the “stalker” messages to someone who was not only outside of that key demo group, but who would, in fact, freak out at being stalked. That someone is now suing the company for $10 million USD, and there is every reason to believe that she will get it…

Now, one of the problems involved with starting any new marketing campaign is breaking through the massive wall of advertising and other information with which every potential customer is being bombarded, all day and every day. Viral ad campaigns have been so successful, at least in part, because they aren’t like thousands of other ads, and because they operate outside of the usual advertising channels. Certainly, the idea of a promotional campaign that allows you to prank your friends is a novel idea, and the company appears to have gone to some remarkable lengths to make the whole thing believable. One of the “stalker” personae is a heavy metal musician, for example, and the company’s advertising people went so far as to create a web site for the bank this persona is in, including recording songs for an album and putting MP3 files of those songs up on the site. They created social media identities for the stalkers, listed information for them on websites, developed blogs, and in short built up a web presence for these make-believe monsters that is more extensive than that belonging to most real people. It seems a lot of effort for something so completely misguided, but then I think that’s the point…

I’ll admit that despite minoring in Marketing both times I was in graduate school, I really don’t know that much about the science. It’s a complex, statistically-intense analytic discipline, and much of what the Marketing scholars do remains beyond my grasp even to this day. But I know a lot about sales, having made my living that way several times, and even more about strategic management, having studied, taught, and earned my living doing it over a great many years. And for the life of me, I can’t imagine how anyone could have believed that this campaign would help to sell cars in the first place, let alone failing to realize that the prank system would be used to do real harm to people who wouldn’t think that such a prank was amusing in the first place…