Yep, big fat, stinking hypocrites. Why? Because we perpetrate the same marketing bullshit that annoys us to no end on our own prospects and customers. Think I’m joking? How many times have you secretly – or publicly – wished a company would treat you like an actual human being in their messaging? Wished they would actually send you information that recognized your own special snowflake qualities?
Now, turn it around: when was the last time you actually tried to give the same level of appreciation with your own prospects and customers? Do you see each name and recognize it belongs to an individual?
Before you answer, honestly consider about how you think about that house file in your CRM. Think about how you organize your reports. Think about how you’re rewarded in your job. Think about what really matters in your success.
None of this is intended to point fingers (hell, I know I would already have three fingers pointing right back at me). Instead, my intent is to stir some awareness that things need to change. And that change should start with the language, syntax, imagery we use in marketing. As my esteemed friend and fellow marketer, Russ Somers, notes in his Human Marketing Manifesto (and also the genesis of this post):
“I am not traffic. I am not driven by your marketing to your site like a lemming is driven by instinct to a cliff’s edge. I am a person who had a need to know something…Where am I in your funnel? What a stupid question. Who the hell wants to be in a funnel?”
I don’t have any definitive answers…at least not yet. But it seems to me that if marketing as a discipline is to evolve toward where the world is going, we better get ourselves together and plot a new direction. Else, we don’t need to wait for the comet to wipe out our profession, we’ll have done all the damage ourselves.