If something is of value, people will tell their friends. That's what it means.
Much of the marketing world, rather than offering something materially different, or emphasizing some benefit for the viewer hopes to get by, instead, by pretending to give a hoot about their putative customers. As you wait on hold for hours at a time, or wrestle with an imbecilic bot, you'll likely be told twice a minute that your call is important to the company so assiduously ignoring your call.
Gods or rats live in our work, too.
Member-get-a-member is also not just a way of selling, it's a way of living. If you're a decent human being.
From an advertising point of view, in my ill-informed way of looking at the direct-marketing world, the apotheosis of member-get-a-member was the work done for MCI, the nascent phone company, when they helped break AT&T's monopoly.
Messner, Berger, Vetere, Carey, McNamee, Schmetterer, and others developed MCI's "friends and family" work. Basically, they premised, you probably make 92-percent of your calls to just four or five people. If you help MCI sign up those people everyone will save some high percentage on their calls. You win. Your friends win. MCI wins.
That's what marketing is supposed to do. Offer advantages and benefits and information to people that helps them get things they wouldn't ordinarily otherwise get. And thereby help clients, too.
A friend of mine, a one-time client once said to me, a good ad should make a viewer feel like "where have you been all my life?" Maybe that means there should be a bit of a revelation in it, a new-ness, a wow. Our single litmus test on the launch of IBM Watson was that the ad had to tell the viewer of something they could do that they couldn't do before. "I couldn't do this, now I can." Now, that's a net-take-away.
I'm 99.79-percent sure a $49.99 phone plan, or a mom driving an SUV-full of plastic children to soccer practice in the rain doesn't do any of those things and bores the corpuscles out of you to boot.
Marketers are quick to call people members or family. Their loathe to actually treat customers with any semblance of kindness or decency. If I had a dime for every ad agency that says, "we treat people like family," I'd have at least eighty cents now. (I think there are only about eight agencies left. Nine more than we need.)
My local supermarket calls itself "your family market," but it's hard to get one of their low-wage workers to ring up your order, slice your turkey, help you find something, not put the eggs under the detergent or attend to the clean up in aisle six.
I suppose if I adhered more to the Marxian dialectic, I'd file "member-get-a-member" under the heading of cognitive dissonance or bait-and-switch or robbing-peter-to-pay-paul. You can't just call someone a member and not treat them with kindness, consideration, caring and decency. Most people can see through that like they can see past trump's cranial merkin.
Corporations call people members but treat them like members on the cheap. They hope to proffer loyalty through dopey things like bonus miles or rewards that pay for nothing, that can't be used for what you want, and expire just as you need them.
About two weeks ago, I was sent a direct mail piece by American Express (I've been a member since 1982). The package included literally ten-feet of single-spaced six-point type delineating all the conditions under which the lavish membership rewards they promise cannot be used.
That's giving something only to take it away just as quickly. It's advertising three-card-monte. And it's treating people like, in David Ogilvy's words, morons. No one is too stupid not to notice insults like these. And the can'ts and I'm sorrys and other excuses you get in response to every reasonable request or complaint.
Just as a principle isn't a principle until it costs you money, customer care isn't customer care until it costs you money. Even if the money just goes into creating something thoughtful, informative, and interesting, not banal and machine-made.
If you want to see an example of thoughtful, informative, and interesting, take a look at this. Maybe no one outside of the industry in real-life noticed the descender in the "y" in the headline breaking into the body copy. I'm sure you can't track the ROI on that sort of craft. But these things are felt and sensed, and they add to the value of a brand (and to sales.)
Instead, we eliminate descenders breaking into body copy, asserting (because they can't be measured) no one cares. Let the algorithm do it. My customers are too cretinous to notice.
The Yale art-critic Vincent Scully once said about New York's Mead, McKim and White designed Penn Station which was torn down in 1966 and replaced with a low-ceilinged, fluorescent lighting, linoleum and gale-force wafts of stale urine horror.
Gods or rats live in our work, too.
Who emerges from our work is up to us. Gods or rats.
WPP, in its own PR, misses the point. I don't know anyone anywhere who wants exponentially more content, especially in a world where more 99.79-percent of the time exponentially more means cheaper, dumber and uglier.
In the meantime, in my world, about 94-percent of the work I get comes from friends who call me or recommend me. About three or six times a week, I call someone or recommend something.
Member-get-a-member, friends and family, human decency takes real skin in the game. It takes real quid to get a pro-quo. It takes kindness to get kindness.
Good work, good effort, good you-ing gets you good.
I guess the shorthand in all this was said best by John Donne, in his poem "No Man is an Island," writ in 1624.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Or, it was said even earlier as in "do unto others."
Old and corny.
Which marketers, and politicians, never learned.
No comments:
Post a Comment