Here’s today’s conventional wisdom about marketing: If you have something to sell, every minute of every day, you put your product or service in front of absolutely everyone you can using whatever means you can get your hands on.
In case you haven’t noticed, the clamor for this kind of attention is now at nerve-shattering levels.
Recently, I tried giving something away, and I was once again surprised and disappointed by how suspicious (even angry!) people can get. Whatever happened to “thank you”?
First, a bit of background. Besides my bread-and-butter professional work as a business communication consultant, I also have hobby business: I encourage college liberal arts majors to see how their education can be preparing them for careers in business leadership. I majored in English myself, then went on to a 25 year career in corporate management. My English degree prepared me for this in ways people who don’t have a liberal arts degree don’t get.
Among the offerings in my hobby business is a blog called, simply, “For English Majors” where I detail why and how understanding literature (character and motivation), combined with the ability to analyze abstraction, is essential to business leadership. The blog is free, not only to me but to everyone who reads and comments. It’s a gift. No strings attached. No follow-up emails. No need to subscribe. You can visit and leave as you wish, entirely anonymously if you prefer.
I occasionally send postcards, personal emails and personal letters (yes, old fashioned letters with stamps) to invite anyone who’s the slightest bit interested in the future of English majors and the future of business—students, faculty, administrators, and hiring managers—to check it out. What can they possibly lose? It’s free. It’s unusual. It’s practical. It’s credible. It’s needed. And did I mention it’s free?
Here’s what usually happens after I send postcards, emails and letters. One in fifty results in a reply, usually from an academic for whom letter-writing is not a lost art. A few departments link to my blog. I write to thank them. A university in Oregon invited me to speak to their Humanities Division. Of course I did.
But the most telling was a university in New Hampshire whose career center wrote to ask me if it was okay to post a link to my blog on their site (of course!). And then they wrote this:
“Once you have notified us of your approval. Please do not contact us again. Remove us immediately from your listserv. This offer must not lead to anything for which we will be charged in the future. We will not subscribe to your publication and do not wish to be contacted about your available services.”
Sheesh, I thought. I’m not selling anything. It’s a gift. You’re not on my “listserv” and you never were. Climb down! But instead I wrote back that I was pleased they’d be linking to “For English Majors” and I assured them I found the practices they described “deplorable” and wouldn’t subject them to any such thing.
You can’t blame them. They’re gun-shy, and they’re not alone. They’re tired of the rapid-fire pop-up ads, the “buy this” emails, the pushy questionnaires (“What’s your ideal job?”) that lead to more ads. They’ve had it with poorly written “white papers,” once a source of real information, now thinly disguised sales brochures for products that take a little explaining (like IT security or disaster recovery). They’ve signed up for one too many webinars that promise to teach something but digress quickly to selling something instead.
That’s one example of what marketing has done for us. But wait. There’s more.
I met a young man not long ago who told me he’s a firm believer in writing “thank you” notes. Before I had a chance to agree with him, he shared this secret: He uses a service that mass produces the notes, using technology that emulates his handwriting to produce notes that look like he wrote them. He was beaming with pride as he described this.
“That seems to me to be counter to your intentions,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“You’re sending personal messages impersonally.”
“Ah, but that’s the beauty of it,” he explained, beaming some more. “The recipient of the note doesn’t know it.”
Not yet. But next time I get a thank you note (and certainly if I ever get one from him), I’ll hold it close under my nose to see if it passes the sniff test. It won’t be long before everyone does that.
But wait. There’s more.
An acquaintance I met through a networking event asked me, “Have you heard about this cool book publishing thing? You pay a fee and write a chapter and your chapter is included in a book of chapters written by famous business writers. So there you are in a volume with the likes of Ken Blanchard” (the one minute manager guy) “and Jim Collins” (the Good to Great guy). “Just you and Ken and Jim. Isn’t that sweet?”
No, it’s not sweet. You buy your way into print filling the set-aside pages between Ken and Jim (who, no doubt, were handsomely compensated for appearing here with you and other showcasers). And the integrity in that is…where?
And, of course, there’s still more.
Article-blaster.com fires whatever it is you’ve written to as many online destinations as possible for the primary purpose of driving web traffic to your site. It doesn’t matter what you’ve written, it matters how thoroughly it’s blasted. Publishing articles in as many places as possible is one method of maximizing visits to your website. The byproduct is that it measures articles in bulk only. Content, quality, relevance, and literacy don’t matter. What matters is how close you get to the front of the Google hit parade.
So here’s what marketing “best practices” have done for business: made consumers exceptionally protective and suspicious; enabled insincerity to achieve new heights; diluted “whitepapers” (once a centerpiece of research and credibility) to mere sales brochures; and reduced books and articles to commercial showcase platforms.
This seems to me more like planting the seeds of unshakable distrust rather practices that fuel a robust vibrant economy.
The ability to buy one’s way into a publishable book of essays by popular writers should further warn all of us of the fundamental lack of ethics in marketing, and supply further evidence why professional areas such as hospitals, schools, prisons, journalism, etc. are all suspect when run by private sector business.
Thanks for alerting us.
Seth Godin wrote about how we are bombarded with marketing messages at a rate of about 3000/day in his book “Permission Marketing.” He published this book in 1999.
Email marketing is challenging because it competes with other day-to-day business email, and most professionals I know are overloaded with email. In one of my seminars the other day we were discussing the problem of email overload, and one of the students, an engineer, said that he is expected to respond to emails promptly from the time he wakes up in the morning until he goes to sleep at night. Two other engineers from a different company said that they need to respond to emails within 3 hours.
The fundamental business problem is beyond marketing. Technology has enabled over-communication, and I believe this has caused productivity to decline. This problem needs solutions.