I've been part of the weekend translating to English my last book, and trying to find new examples about Traditional Marketing. Here is what I came with:
Traditional marketing was based on the idea creating a need in the mind of the user, so you sell him your product, which will solve it. And the technique was bombing ads and promotions to the public; without segmentation.
I don’t care about what “greats gurus of Traditional Marketing” (or just let call them dinosaurs) said (or say, if there is still one alive); it all was based on a brute-force attack:
“if we can sell to 1 person of each 100 people that watch our ad 30 times, let’s scalate and bombing millions of them, thousand of times in several medias”
(-another dinosaur trying to justified his six figures annually).
Also:
“let’s send 20 salespeople door-to-door for the same area for the next 52 weeks, Soon or later, they will sell something. Also, they must use tricks to scam old people, like say: “your neighbour already has it, is she better than you?” or “it’s an exclusive offer for you and only this week, next week will be too late” or “our Company only wants the best for you (and get your pension money)”.
(-the “door-to-door cold selling” salesman’s dilemma”)
and, of course, this classic:
“(it’s evening or weekend and a call disrupted you):
- Good evening, may I talk to the lady of the house?
- (WTF?!)
(…)
-… sir, your number has been generated randomly by our computer. You are not in any commercial list.
(well, how lucky I am! I should buy a lottery ticket! It’s the 25th time I get a call like that this month!)
(- The Curious Case of the telemarketer and the random number)
All the previous bullying techniques are doomed to fail. All you can achieve a high level of frustration and hatred on the users to you.
At the beginning of time, ok, it had sense. There were not too many communication channels, so you used these methods to make your services or products known to the public and potential customers.
Somehow, at certain point it changed, and it became a statistical model, based on numbers:becoming the scourge of the traditional marketing. A disease, a virus, a parasite no longer useful, but still, going on in continue adaptation. Maybe you recognize it: it’s what we call now SPAM; and mostly all big companies hire spammers services. It will never end.
So, thanks to that, all people who work in marketing (including me), have to be tagged with this idiotic label:
“be careful, he works on marketing… I’m sure he only wants to sell you something”
