The Buzz Bin

“Don’t play semantic games with the prospect. Advertising is not a debate. It’s a seduction.”

- Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning

Advertising stopped working a long time ago, prompting Positioning theories and strategies from Ries and Trout. We’re discussing it next week in our weekly Georgetown class on Social Media for Social Good.  And what would a classic advertising strategy book be doing in a class that leads off with the Cluetrain Manifesto?  Well, you can get social media, but if you don’t understand what makes people fall in love with causes, products,  services and ideas then you may as well mail it in (image: Marcel Desaulniers’ "Chocolate Demise" by fooey).

Is seduction too strong a word?  I think not.

The whole premise of Positioning 30 years ago was that consumers intentionally avoid advertising and corporate propaganda.  Communicators are in a perpetual losing battle for the attention of inundated minds. That was when there was only 50 channels and No Internet, much less social media!  The situation for communicators has gotten much more dire, and their empty platitudes and PR messages fall flat, failing left and right at astonishingly high percentages.

Getting in the mind of donors, advocates, citizens and buyers, and tempting them, enticing them to become interested in your efforts is a great accomplishment.  It’s hard cutting through the clutter, achieving impact, and retaining commitment.

It means you’ve listened, you understand them, you have value for them, and can build meaningful experiences that resonate in their minds and hearts. You haven’t lied to them, peppered them with corporate messages or BSed them, but you have thought about them, cultivated trust, and positioned yourself to cut through the extremely fractured traditional and social media environments… Not only to be heard, but also welcomed. Indeed, in this kind of media environment that’s seduction. And it’s just good old-fashioned marketing strategy.

Strategy, Again.

Social media and technical savviness does not equate to marketing strategy. Nor do blogs, a bookmarking widget, or crowdsourcing.  That’s a meaningless Twitter debate that stakeholders don’t care about. What does count is creating a meaningful way, a method, an overarching course to get and keep the attention of your stakeholders. The rest is tactical. 

Like advertising in Positioning, if you can succeed in creating meaningful communications in this particular media form (social), then its likely your strategy will work across diverse traditional media, too, just with different tactics. Positioning is all about finding that way to cut through the clutter with a strategy that separates your market and convinces stakeholders that they should give you that listen.  If your cause, service, or product is worthy and you successfully position, communicating becomes easy.

Great strategies are clear, they are simple, and they ring true and unique.  They stand out in a crowd and attract the right kind of people, those whose attention we are working so hard to attain.

That’s why we’re reading Positioning.  To jog the mind. To think of ways to entice, stand out and use our few, precious opportunities with our stakeholders online to attract them, and strike a meaningful conversation that becomes an even greater relationship.