subject: Marketing to a niche is different [print this page] Marketing to a niche is different Marketing to a niche is different
Sound-bites some food for thought
Marketing to business people, especially to senior business people, seems to need a different approach from marketing to a mass of consumers. Tony Scott tries to make sense of current trends.
President George Bush and John Kerry spent something over $1bn on attracting and keeping the attention of American voters during their election battle in 2004. President Barack Obama spent more in 2008, and will almost certainly spend more again in 2012. Their expensive advisers deduced that the best way to do that was to make their messages so simple as to be almost meaningless I'll make America safer and stronger' (they'd hardly promise danger and enfeeblement) and to smear the opposition so shamelessly as to be scarcely believable.
In 2005 and 2010, British politicians also spent more than ever and in much the same ways. The short-term result was Labour's third term in office, then its replacement by a coalition. The longer-term result, however, may be more scepticism about politicians, and more loss of faith in rational discourse itself.
After all, if complex issues can be reduced to banality, and if it is acceptable to shoot the messenger rather than address the message, grown-up debate gives way to playground taunts; and arriving at a conclusion becomes as random as channel-hopping.
Which gives rise to a problem. If the advisers' research reflects a real shift in taste, then the shift ought to worry business leaders as well as politicians. If a business is concerned as it should be with protecting and growing its brand for longer than a politician's time horizon, how can it best do so in a market which is likely to become more competitive, more frantic, and more shrill?
To get heard at all, if the US political research is to be believed, any organisation needs to make a lot of noise. But to attract long-term loyalty, it needs to provide something more substantial: food for thought rather than merely sound-bites.
And this is not true only in the USA. Similar trends are visible on this side of the Atlantic. Consider two straws in the wind from a leaflet about local health services which arrived through my door the other day from a well-meaning council.
This leaflet,' it tells me, contains important and useful information. Keep it somewhere handy so you can find it quickly.'
The same leaflet goes on to explain that the main local hospital was rated at one star this year lower than the previous year and only one notch up from complete failure. Yet the next sentence gushes about new initiatives already in place' to make next year's performance even better' (my italics).
Notice, in both examples, the slippery masking of truth. In the first, matey phrasing tries to make palatable a firm nanny-knows-best instruction. In the second, the words try to imply that what was actually lamentable was creditable.
Do the subterfuges work? Perhaps it depends on the audience. What the research seems to show will work in a mass-market appeal in the USA may merely irritate a more narrowly focused target audience in Europe.
But there is also a deeper issue, to do with ends and means. Even if the research shows that crudeness and taunting succeed in the short term, dare we take the risk of the longer-term damage they may do to social cohesion? And if not, should any socially responsible business have any truck with them?
For a sophisticated audience, the rules of marketing via mailshots, websites, emails and conference speeches seem to be very different. Not bombast but sincerity. Not gloss and spin but unvarnished truth. Not so much shrill as quiet and reassuring.
Amid all the hullabaloo the metaphorical earthquake, wind and fire' of traditional mass advertising a still small voice of calm can and does stand out. It did, after all, work for Moses.
Tony Scott (http://www.oliverscottconsulting.com) is a director of Oliver Scott Consulting Ltd). He specialises in resolving business communication issues.
