The 5 most over(ab)used marketing words in 2007
What is your list of overused or abused concepts in marketing for this past year? Here is mine:
- Conversations - most marketers do not know what a conversation is, let alone carry one. Many things are conversations, but I do not believe that marketing can be conversational.
- Engagement – after many years of thoughtful research, the ARF, the ANA, and the AAAA came together to define engagement as “Turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.” WOW – I wonder how they justified this to their paying members?
- Transparency – another good one. Of course we want everything to be transparent – but how did this all of a sudden become a new requirement?
- Authenticity – what does that really mean anyway. I want my Coke to be a Coke…the same Coke that I grew up with. How will “authenticity” enhance that?
- Attention – nothing new here either. In 1918, an article published in Modern Man declared: “Psychologists tell us that the mind is under a continual bombardment of ideas, all of which are trying to make an impression on it. The prospect, therefore, does not sit around with his mind a blank, calmly waiting for someone or something to capture his attention without a struggle. The salesman enters a field already well occupied and must fight for the undivided attention that is a successful sale.”
On to a new year – when marketing will hopefully be able to grab people’s attention and perhaps even engage them by becoming an authentic and transparent conversation!
Argh…forget it…
Enjoy the Holidays! I am off skiing…
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December 27th, 2007 at 12:51 am
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December 31st, 2007 at 1:17 am
As one who plays the role of marketee more often than that of marketer, it seems to me that when I am in a serious conversation I have an experience that is very different from the experience I have when I am a marketee. In a serious conversation both interlocutors are prepared to weigh both or all sides of an issue. It takes a marketer who is more than just a marketer to carry on a conversation in which the various pros and cons of his or her product will be weighed dispassionately. Or would that be the best marketer?
January 5th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
[...] come The 5 most over(ab)used marketing words in 2007 sound like they came straight from the “emerging church conversation”? Just asking, [...]