It’s a
disturbing book for people in advertising, marketing and PR. But that's what makes it so
'unputdownable'! It dismantles the ideas we have come to accept with regard to
‘positioning’, PowerPoint presentations, mission statements and memos. It’s
a set of principles that challenges the old premises of
messaging. Campaigns were once a
set of ideas that flowed from the marketer to the end user. Guess what, say the authors
the customers now call the shots. Corporate rhetoric, the 'self-centered
drone emanating from Marketing departments' is ‘sterile
happy talk’ which does
not win customers. But like word of mouth advertising of thousands of years ago, word of
web communication is a powerful phenomenon devoid of clichés and resonant of the rich
human voice.
So this is the end of Gobbledygook?
So what are advertising departments and MarComs and PR people to do in this scenario? Do
they have a role, or are they obsolete? First, say the writers, we have to disengage
ourselves from ‘corporate messaging’. What marketers call "spin", the
attempt to varnish the truth, sticks out like a sore thumb on the Net. Ads get parodied
phrases like ‘extended enterprise client server’ mean nothing to people, they
say.
Corporations are not used to speaking in their human voice. These "legal
fictions" that "speak through a single orifice" don’t have or body
language to betray their real intentions. A good example of why corporate-speak serves no
one, was seen in the recent Firestone tire recall. For weeks, the company hid behind ads
and lawyers, while the marketplace was all abuzz about the tread separation taking place
on their Wilderness tires. Ford Motor company, which was implicated in the scandal because
these tires were specifically made for its Explorer SUV, came off much stronger because it
came out and acknowledges the tragedy without trying to spin the message.
Marketers should acknowledge that the conversations in the marketplace are
‘products’ themselves! Turn your marketing communication into stories, they say.
"We live in stories. We breathe stories. Most of our best conversations are about
stories. ..Stories are not a lot like information, but they are the way we
understand."
