Those Damn Marketers…

Marketing as a profession is both idealized (think Mad Men) and despised in our society. Mitch Joel has a provocative post up on his Twist Image blog that laments a bit of the latter sentiment with a fantastically linkable headline “Kill All Marketers” (his blog in general is a must read).

Good marketers tell effective, believable, compelling, and *true* stories about their products and brands. They help shape the world around them through truly powerful stories blended with the underlying science that makes up the day to day execution of marketing tactics (social, direct, advertising, etc.). Seth Godin famously nailed this idea, and hinted at the downside of it, in his bestselling book “All Marketers Are Liars” – which he has tellingly renamed “All Marketers Tell Stories.”

Where marketers, and marketing as a profession earn our sometimes poor reputation, is when:

• The stories are false
• The means used to tell them are deceptive or abusive

As Seth notes, the marketer’s job is on one level to help people come to understand and believe a particular worldview through the use of storytelling. When the stories turn out to be false, and worldviews get shattered, people tend to – quite rightly – take that personally. Their offense at being lied to turns into anger and disgust at the ones who tried to make them believe. The marketers.

The same holds for the means used to tell the story, another place where the marketing profession gets tripped up. Bad actors out there who employ deceptive or abusive marketing tactics – everything from black hat web techniques to bait-and-switch discounts, false advertising to spam (in email, comments, tweets, and so on) – constantly remind people that those trying to tell them stories, trying to sell them on something, very often cannot be trusted.

Marketing, when done honestly, intelligently, and with directness and passion is an honorable profession that helps drive the engine of our of society in a positive direction. It’s why I’m proud to call myself a marketer.

Unfortunately, people tend to remember the failures and scandals, the stories born out as false, and the profession the bad actors claimed as their own. All of marketing gets tarred in the process, and the good guys like Mitch have to toil twice as hard as an evangelist for the profession to fight against that negative perception.

In any profession you’re going to have the charlatans and snake oil salesmen who sully the profession, but it’s the nature of what marketers do – try to tell grand stories on a vast stage – that makes the actions of those few loom so large.

Trey Pennington at PRSA Tar Heel, and some passionate bandana fans

Last week I had the privilege of attending the monthly networking luncheon for the local (Greensboro) chapter of the PRSA. Aside from a general desire to get out and start meeting some local practitioners from my adopted new home town, I was very interested in seeing what the guest speaker, Trey Pennington, had to say about social media.

Now, in general it’s easy to rapidly tire of the same rehashed social media tips presentations, typically with recycled titles like “7 CRAZY ideas for TAKING OVER THE WORLD using social media! YEAAAH!”

What matters are the real world examples. I don’t really care to hear about general concepts anymore, but I absolutely love hearing about interesting ways companies are seeing real value in their use of social media as part of the marketing and communications mix.

Which brings us back to Trey. Fortunately, he spent little time on the general stuff and lots of time telling a couple great stories about companies I’d never heard of and how they use (or, in one case, deliberately decided not to) social tools. The one that stuck for me is Carolina Manufacturing, the Greenville, SC manufacturer of…bandanas.

Though bandanas might not be in everyone’s wardrobe, at least since the early ’90s (unless you’re Bret Michaels, of course), they really are a perfect product to build a social media marketing effort around.

Why?

Because they all have a story, and there are small pockets of deeply passionate people who love telling them. You’ll have to see Trey talk to get the full story, but the marketing director for Carolina Manufacturing, @MaddenKim, discovered micro-communities of passionate fans of the company’s distinctive bandanas.

Dog lovers, cyclists, not-quite-retired ex-rockers, celebrity tycoons…even while bandanas generally faded from pop culture over the years, these small groups of hard core fans kept up their love, found each other online, and created their own conversation and communities around the iconic head gear.

The really cool part of the story is how Kim and team found these micro-communities, embraced them, and made their personal passions part of the brand’s story. A small but wonderful real world example of how a company can tap into practical social media marketing.