No one cares about your product or services.
There it is.
Just take a moment to digest that.
Okay, a little clarification is needed here. Perhaps customers care a little bit (and for some brands with super loyal customers, a little bit extra).
But mostly not.
They might prefer your TV ad or your brand identity but your product and service? It’s a means to an end. Insurance gives protection, but we love Rhonda and Ketut.
The best marketers know this. The great marketers manage to convince the CEO, COO, CFO and other bigwigs too. This is very difficult.
Right now, in boardrooms across the country, the marketing team is being told: “We need our customers to know about our new widget.”
Who wants to tell the big boss that the customers don’t give two farts about the new widget? It’s not easy.
Hopefully, the new widget comes with a big fat budget to spend on TV advertising, big launch events and PR. Samsung did it well recently: http://goo.gl/u1QR7
But in some cases there is a new widget and no budget. That’s when marketers really quake in their boots. They are expected to use cheaper communications channels to gain interest. That’s PR and social media. That’s hard going.
But it can be done. It just takes a shift in thinking. It’s ignoring this question:
What do we want to say?
Toss it. Ask this instead:
What do our customers what to hear?
That’s more like it. I feel better already.
Beyond that, it’s hard to correlate what your customers want to hear with your new widget . The widget must make people’s lives easier, help them, give them more choice, or save them time or money. If it doesn’t, why does it exist?
Focus on that and the widget launch with no budget might succeed.
Need to reach the back-to-school market? Share research on issues that parents worry about. Want to get cut through amidst the crazy summer sales: offer massages in store for stressed out shoppers. Stunts and surveys are cost-effective social networking and PR winners (no flash mobs please.)
In PR Daily’s recent article the best social media advice for 2013 (read it here: http://goo.gl/Ws7Nu) content marketing David Meerman Scott, author of The New Marketing and PR said it best: “Nobody cares about your product or services. They care about themselves and solving problems. Your online content needs to be less egotistical and more helpful.”
