By John Eberhard
A few months back I wrote an article on how I have noticed a major uptick in the amount of dishonesty in marketing today, from out and out scams to people lying about what they could do for you, or just lying saying they have reviewed your website or whatever.
Combined with the raw amount of sales messages the average person is hit with today, my take is that a lot of people are just tuning out all marketing messages, not answering their phone, not answering their emails, etc. Many marketers have betrayed the public’s trust with all this dishonesty.
So what should a marketing person do in the face of this marketing message tsunami, which includes large helpings of dishonesty?
The first thing I think marketers should do is be scrupulously honest in all their marketing messages. No lies. No gross exaggerations. No saying you can do things for the prospect that you cannot do. No saying you have done things that you haven’t done. No inflated claims. Of course part of marketing is you want to put the best face on whatever you are selling. But the lie is a line you shouldn’t cross.
The second thing you should do, as I have written in other recent articles, is find marketing media that are not overly saturated with your type of business. If you are a dentist and there are 50 other dentists in your small city, and they are all on Google, maybe Google isn’t the right place for you to put your time and money. Find other media or websites or platforms that don’t have 50,000 dentists advertising.
I have commented before that when there are a ton of one type of business, some media will tend to commoditize your type of business. In other words, make your business into a commodity, which is defined as “a substance or product or service that can be traded, bought, or sold.”
The problem with commodities is that they are generally viewed as all the same. The prospect cannot really differentiate between them. So then the buying decision generally just comes down to price.
There are a number of websites today where a company can sign up to have their business listed, and the public comes to that site looking for that type of business. There are sites like this for home improvement, attorneys, musicians, marketing people, and more. The problem with many of these sites is you can sign up and you will receive leads, but you receive very little data or details on what the person needs or wants. But you are expected to give a quote. So everyone is made into a commodity and the public chooses based mainly on price.
So other than finding media that are not over-saturated with your type of business, how can a business differentiate itself from the pack today? One of the ways I recommend is to be scrupulously honest in all your marketing and sales actions. You can become known as the “no BS” company. And you can help roll back the trend of dishonest marketing and help put ethics back into the marketing industry.
