The market value of authenticity
I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s latest free PDF book, What Matters Now. It’s a very short read, but it makes you think. What it got me thinking about is authenticity, which is generally the last think you think of as having any place in the marketing world.
Marketing is about lies, right? It’s about convincing people your cheaply made crap (that you copied from some poor schmo) is worth tons more than it’s really worth, so they’ll buy it and make you rich. We all see these stories every day. We all buy some of the crap, at least until we learn how often we’re being lied to. Marketers target the young not because they spend more or have more to spend, but because they don’t have as good a bullshit radar as most of us develop as we mature. Marketing is a pile of cynical, greed-driven lies.
Except when it’s not. I think I got so proud of my bullshit radar that I stopped noticing the times something wasn’t bullshit. I started noticing again recently, and I’m seeing a shift toward “no bullshit” marketing. I see commercials that make fun of the claims you’d expect them to make about their products. I see ads that actually contain useful information. I see products that totally rock getting nothing but word of mouth advertising.
As we slide into a recession bad enough to make everyone cynical, what marketing campaigns are going to work? What does a family of four with uncertain employment spend its money on? Why would they spend it on you? In a market like this, the number of people who can afford to spend money on crap shrinks dramatically. Suddenly, the usual old pitches that worked on everybody from the middle class up start working on only that small fraction of the populace who are in denial or so wealthy they can’t be affected by a recession.
Now really is the time for authenticity. Keep marketing simple. Make promises you can keep. Tell people what you’ve got and what it will do for them without exaggeration. Get your credibility up there, and they will remember you.
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Well said. I like your blog. It is authentic