Take the case of the new Poland Spring Eco-Shape bottle. The first reaction to that name is “yeah right – here comes some more marketing speak. How can the shape of a bottle be anything Eco? Does it make it easier for animals to swallow without choking when they end up on the dump?”

In this case the bottle is truly Eco-friendly – it uses 30% less plastic and 30% less paper for the label – all good stuff. But you have to read the marketing blurb to figure that out, and how many people really go through that step when they are on the run drinking a small bottle of Poland Spring?

It would be interesting to see how many people get an initial negative or heavily skeptical reaction to the Poland Spring’s Eco marketing message. I bet you that is not an insignificant portion of the consumer base.

What marketers forget sometimes is that most people no longer trust their companies or the messages coming from them. If you do not run your cutesy marketing message, which may be full of good intentions, through the “I do not trust you” customer filter, you may end up hurting your cause more than helping it.

What would have been wrong with just telling me “Poland Spring – 30% less plastic, 30% less paper”? It is direct and it conveys the message without giving me much room for interpretation. And because it is a quantitative message, I am less inclined to doubt it.

It does not matter what you think about your customers – what really matters is what they think about themselves. Many marketers overlook this point and end up talking about their products in ways that the customer can not relate to.

Let’s take a high-tech example that continuously pops up, especially as you have many ex-enterprise-software marketers now marketing software-as-a-service solutions. You might think of the market you’re selling into as the enterprise market – large multinational companies with thousands of employees. If your buyer is not in IT and if she can buy your solution by the drink and expense the cost of it – she is not going to think of herself as an enterprise buyer. So even if you have hundreds or thousands of users like that in a single enterprise, if you start positioning your product as an enterprise solution – your potential buyers will not associate themselves as candidate customers for your solution and never buy it.

It does not matter how you segment your market – always think about what the potential buyers think about themselves…