My name is Roman, and I have been responsible for marketing, branding, and communications in foreign and Russian companies for 15 years now. Today, there will be no cases or insights, and I won’t even write about your “favorite” trends.
Marketers, inspired by the philosophy of “successful success”, love to talk about what a great brand/advertising campaign they created and how effectively, inexpensively, quickly (underline as appropriate) they did it. I would like to highlight the main mistakes that I encountered myself in the process of work.
Here are my personal top 5:
Mistake 1. I am my target audience
Often we project our tastes and preferences onto our target audience . For example, if I work in marketing for a development company and country email list I like going to the theater, then I start to think that our clients, buyers of expensive real estate, also definitely go there.🤔
But the truth is, the audience may be completely different! It is important to remember that we are not always a reflection of our customers. Study the interests and needs of customers to create truly valuable and relevant offers.
Mistake 2: All customers are rational
Very often, especially in the mass market, marketers, when launching advertising, rely on data and research results that study some sets of parameters. For example, in real estate, an apartment is chosen by price and location. And in the segment of expensive cars – by the presence of additional options and characteristics: a more powerful engine, more functions.
What the client is silent about: tools and methods for assessing customer experience
Data and research are good, they can serve as web3 and the promise of a better internet a basis when it comes to rational consumer behavior. But we know that in life, buyers are irrational and choose, among other things, with their soul and heart. Otherwise, how can we explain that a Mercedes-Benz, which used to cost 8 million rubles, is now bought for 28!
Understanding this feature, be sure to create emotional communications – such contact with the buyer will be of the highest quality.
Mistake 3. Data in Marketing
Marketers make several mistakes at once. They try to measure everything they can reach, blindly trust this data, manage to find correlations and draw some conclusions.
Parents who have children aged 3-7 years have probably already encountered the history of drawing analysis and their interpretation by child marketing list psychologists. It is generally accepted that the sun in children’s drawings represents the mother, as it is associated with warmth and happiness. Therefore, many mothers worry: why does the child draw clouds and rain – is he depressed?
Both adults and children show problems with a whole complex of signs that add up to a complex formula. It is necessary to study many drawings and the signals they give before confidently declaring that a “cloud” instead of a “sun” means problems in the family.
In the same way, in marketing, you should be critical of the data sources, patterns and conclusions you find. Don’t transfer the final responsibility for the decision you make to “the numbers that never lie.” They do lie, and how.
Mistake 4. The process is more important than the result
Marketers are like a squirrel in a wheel, whose task is to run all the time, despite the circumstances, and launch advertising campaigns. In a hurry, under the pressure of deadlines or, on the contrary, getting too carried away by the process itself, its stages, “media buying”, “placement” or, on the contrary, creativity, instead of sitting down and thinking about what messages for what audience and for what business purpose we are placing. In the process of placing advertising, we often lose the essence and the answer to the main question “why”?