The key to marketing success is not what you think

Throughout the past couple of months I have attended a few marketing events related to different topics. At the end of the day, I reflected on all the topics exposed by very interesting speakers about marketing trends, digital, technology, and effectiveness. The main thing I took away from all this is one: it's all about people.


The past 10 years transformed the way we do marketing in many ways. With the arrival of technologies, the expansion of the Internet, social media, smartphones, etc. all marketer became obsessed about keeping up with the latest trend. The discussions were about the platform, the channel, the omni-channel, etc. All kinds of technological terms that most of us couldn't even explain.

But the main impact of all this is not what everyone thinks it is. It is exciting on one side (more for me as I am the geeky type) but it's not the main thing. In my BA in Corporate Communications, one of the first thing I learned was about the importance of the message. The clarity, the consistency, the relevance... all keys to effective communications.

In a world were there is a constant fight between the creatives and the techies, everyone actually forgot about the message. And when I said the most important thing is people, it's because we forgot that on the other side of the screen, magazine, newspaper or any other media, there are people.

The truth is, with all these technologies and media proliferation, an average person in a large city receives more than 1,000 advertising messages a day. And most of them think "why should I care?". And they are right. Marketers have become so self centered around what they think its a great creative idea that will win prizes, and using the right channel mix to crack some numbers and show how many millions of impressions they got, and what the reach was, that they forgot the people.

It doesn't matter how many millions of people saw your ad... if its not relevant and has a message that has meaning to them, it's worthless. The clarity of the message is something we used to see in the Coca-Cola of the 80s and 90s. Simple. Effective. Memorable.

On the other hand, marketers also forgot about the other side of the coin. Managing the people internally in their companies is as important as it is to engage your external audiences. Everyone became so desperate to demonstrate ROI that they forgot that engaging your internal leadership so they could understand better the "people" that are their external audiences before getting down to the discussion of the creative idea and the channels is a key to succeed.

It is only when we all understand that we are people in an organization trying to sell to people and engage people through our channels that we can start creating campaigns, messages and content that is relevant, effective and engaging.

Just a thought I wanted to share today and let me know your thoughts on this topic.