Marketing isn’t Advertising
… and it isn’t Evil
To start, let’s define first what I mean by marketing and advertising.
Marketing is simply getting the right message in front of the right eyeballs, while advertising is getting a message in front of any eyeballs. Given the distinction it’s easy to see why so many people adamantly hate advertising.
I’m an avid F1 fan (go Lotus and Kimi!), so much so that when we had an ops engineer from an F1 team apply for a position at DigitalOcean it was as if Steve Jobs himself was applying for a design role.
Twitter knows I’m an F1 fan. I tweet during races, I follow @formula1, I post photos to Instagram from racetracks. That’s why when I was browsing through my stream today I saw an “ad” from Shell.
5 legenday #ferrari F1 cars, one video. Watch now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89J3_p34qN0
So, of course I clicked on it. What greeted me was an amazing commercial featuring five F1 cars, basically from each decade racing through city streets with only the sound of a Ferrari F1 high-revving engine as the musical score.
This is marketing done right!
Marketing cuts through the noise of Advertising
The good news is that because we are so flooded with advertising, it allows great marketing to immediately cut through the noise.
Marketing ties into a narrative and a story that we already have going on inside our heads. It doesn’t force us to accept a new idea or a different point of view. Instead, it’s triggering memories, thoughts, beliefs, that we already hold.
This of course isn’t anything new. It was work that was pioneered by Al Ries and Jack Trout more than 40 years ago!
Marketing is Positioning
If you haven’t yet read Positioning (by Al Ries and Jack Trout), then pick it up immediately. It’s message is only becoming more relevant with the continued deluge of advertising and our ever diminishing attention spans.
Positioning isn’t about your product or service, it’s about the consumer. How do you want the consumer to perceive your product and around what pre-existing notions are you going to anchor your message.
More importantly, who is your consumer? By segmenting what initially may have been a huge market into a really discrete and clear “customer” it naturally begins to define and focus the product that you are creating.
Why I’m now buying gas at Shell
In this campaign Shell did everything right. They took a position that they are a high performance gasoline that powers F1 cars through decades of racing.
F1 is considered by many race fans to be the pinnacle of motorsports and no manufacturer has had the success, and more importantly prestige, that Ferrari has. By capturing Brazil and Monaco they are paying homage to the heritage of F1, while the modern streets of NYC and its taxi cabs paint a juxtaposition to our everyday commute.
Twitter sold my personal info and I approve!
A lot of people are up in arms about companies like Facebook and Instagram selling their information to ad companies. Personally I don’t see anything wrong with it. After all we aren’t charged for using the service and so we are the product.
But ultimately its all about experience. If the ads we are given are actually relevant to our interests and engage us, and especially if we get to consume them inside of the natural flow of the product, then our relationship to these ads will transform.
