Last night I took a loft tour. Everyone living in a lovely loft community opened their doors to show off what they’ve done with their space. It was a lot of brick, a bit of granite, and way too much West Elm. For those who haven’t been introduced, chapters 3-17 of the “How to Live in a Loft” handbook seem to require purchasing large amounts of hip, modern design from the overpriced showrooms of West Elm. The store just oozes “loft living.” Seriously, it does. I saw their couches, tables, and a few random objets d’art scattered about the lofts last night. It reminds me of a marketing lesson.
Marketing lesson #1: Don’t let your marketing show!
In other words, when you make your plan too obvious, people notice. Today’s savvy public is beyond the point of tolerance for the quaint salesman’s pitch. Occasionally it works (Snuggie), but by and large no one wants to be talked at. If it were, we’d all be paying $19.95 for a set of Ginsu knives. Nor is the public consciously interesting in building a dialogue. Things like Twitter work because they give a secondary opportunity to both broadcast and peek into people’s lives. There’s a goldmine of marketing stats waiting to be mined there. But if you asked the public for the same answers you find on Twitter, odds are you wouldn’t get ’em.
Folks who think they “know how to do marketing” usually fail right around here. They do things that’re too blantantly “marketing” for the public to accept or tolerate. Create marketing that achieves a result for your audience while providing successful statistics for you — that’s marketing in a nutshell. The onion unfolds into a million layers underneath that, but you get the basic idea.
The lofts I saw last night were all beautiful. But each occupant, in the pursuit of creating a loft, chose to go with obvious loft stereotypes, and it all looked tired and cliche. They let their marketing show.
