We’ve always believed that marketing and advertising works best when it delivers an emotional connection between whatever is being ’sold’ and whoever is supposed to be doing the buying.

No emotional reaction means no response or action.

Bigger, better, faster, cleaner, tastier is all very well. But it doesn’t ‘get’ you; like Don Draper does in this fantastic scene from the first series of the excellent Mad Men.

Good luck in your next meeting…

(Inspired by a tweet from @socialmedia2day…)

Marketing teams spend millions of pounds in manangement time and agency fees developing briefs, tone of voice guidelines, and executions for every single broadcast message they put out. Every comma becomes a trauma, is that wardobe choice dynamic enough, does that font project our innovativeness? And once they’ve fine-tuned these messages and filmed them in glorious technicolour, they seem to sit back, their labours complete, and rest.

We like to think of marketing in human terms (see our previous post on this). I’d like to suggest this behaviour by brands and their owners is the equivalent of me seeing someone across a crowded room, falling in love with them from afar,  going home and crafting a perfect declaration of my love and why I am the ideal person for them, dispatching this missive, then sitting at my open bedroom window, gazing at the stars, sighing wistfully.

The time and resources devoted to enabling relationships between brands and their consumers can still be achingly inadequate. People who make an effort to find a brand and try to engage in conversation often go unrewarded, faced with impersonal automated email systems or glossy brochure websites.

But this can be easy: it certainly doesn’t need to be hard, or even expensive. But it does require a change of mindset, it does require brands to think of their customer relationships more like, well, real relationships; which need to be 2-way, they need maintaining, they need work. Otherwise, they’re not really relationships.

The work environment has changed immeasurably during my career. In my first market research job as a graduate we created slides of results, and printed them out onto acetates, which then had to dry, before being slotted into holding frames. Any changes and you had to do that slide again. Printers took 5 minutes to produce a single slide.

Tools to ‘enhance productivity’ are rife. We can integrate reporting across multiple platforms. We can create ‘decks’ with far more flexibility and creativity than before. We obsess about animation and builds, about ‘the message’. Death by Powerpoint and Analysis Paralysis are phrases born in the last generation.

But these tools often inhibit and distract us from more rewarding, direct, and meaningful interactions. Why not talk to each other, face-to-face, rather than hiding behind a presentation or an email. Powerpoint comes with built-in protocols and assumptions how charts should be laid out: titles and bullets, graphs and commentary. The Marketing profession has created its own language and terminology, at least partly because…

• marketers are innately aware and guilty that our ‘profession’ is largely Applied Common Sense, so we create ‘technical’ language to lend it more credibility (noone likes to admit this)
• as in other spheres, the jargon is a defensive mechanism to hinder or prevent ‘outsiders’ from realising that marketing is largely Applied Common Sense (see above)…

In marketing parlance, it’s a strategy to create barriers to entry in order to add value to our own core proposition and thereby add value. See what I did there?

Take (for example) two very common marketing strategies, and an alternative description…

Drive Penetration = get more people to buy some

Build AWP / FOP / Loyalty / Share of Requirement etc = Get some people to buy more

But by speaking in tongues, by overlapping objectives, strategies and plans, surrounding ourselves with TLAs, we get bogged down in our own process. Clusters and segements don’t buy brands and products, people do. And all these tools, applications and acronyms simply isolate marketers from the people they claim to want to understand.

As Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign famously realised, the election was about the economy. Well, marketing is about people. If we can get past the jargon, we can start talking as people, in human terms, about what people want and why they want it. Then we can start thinking about how we can give it to them, and make them feel better.