WHY MOST MARKETING FAILS

"Anybody can create professional-looking designs in minutes"

Don't scoff. It's true.

Now that everyone has a laptop and access to a vast array of powerful software, anyone can easily produce professional-looking marketing collateral that looks just like the stuff we see in the media.

The trouble is, that's all it does. It looks like what a professional would produce. And it contains all the relevant information, so it must communicate. Which is fine when your goal is to communicate.

Unfortunately, marketing is not about communicating.

Communication and marketing are not the same

The goal of communicating is to inform. The goal of marketing is to inspire.

When I communicate, I tell you something and leave it up to you to decide what to do about it.

When I market, I touch you emotionally and inspire you to action.

Communicating is rational. Marketing is emotional. When we inform, we address the rational brain. When we market, we address the emotional or limbic brain.

Communication informs, marketing inspires

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, was the first to show how triggering and satisfying our unconscious desires was a powerful way to influence our behaviour.

Using his uncle's theories about what really motivated humans, Bernays showed that he could bypass people's rational brains and work directly with the emotional or limbic brain. When he did this, he could inspire people to do what he wanted.

What Bernays was doing was using Freud's ideas of the Ego (our rational selves) and the Id (our innermost desires) to control the former by triggering the latter.

Anyone who's had an addiction or habit they've found hard to stop can testify that the rational brain thinks it's in charge, but in reality it's rendered powerless by what the limbic brain wants.

Bernays' methods achieved astonishing success and he is credited with creating the industry that became known as Public Relations. The BBC series, The Century of the Self, tells this fascinating story.

To most of us, good marketing is invisible

The key to the success of this approach is that most of us are completely unaware that we are being triggered in this way. Good marketing appears to us like an iceberg. We only see what's above the waterline.

Below the waterline is where the action happens. But to the vast majority of us, it's invisible.

So the army of people producing what they think is marketing – because it looks like the marketing they see – are producing nothing of the sort.

This includes those of us who commission, assess and approve this faux marketing. We're assessing it against what we've seen. But what we've seen isn't the half of it.

The democratisation of the production process has made this worse because it has flooded the market with me-too faux marketing, creating an ever growing data set of failure which unskilled practitioners reference and try to emulate.

Of course, marketers who do understand this and are able to emulate Edward Bernays are in the box seat, as they always have been.

How to fix it

For marketers commissioning new work, the solution is simple: change the question.

Instead of asking "does this communicate?", ask "does this inspire?"

Of course, creating marketing that does inspire is not easy. It's a highly skilled craft that requires understanding, experience and, yes, a large dose of talent. It's not easy to find, but at least you'll be looking in the right place.

There's an old saying that, in any market, 96% of the profits go to 4% of the participants. In Marketing, that's probably about right.