Hugh’s buddy, The Head Lemur, really let one fly today.
Marketeers always deny that what they do is harmful. They create the most convoluted and ‘plausable’ justifications for what they do. They will tell you that marketing is good for you. They will tell you that you can’t live without them and you are somehow incomplete without them. They are wrong. Not because of the creativity, but because of the format of the internet.
Traditional Marketing Wisdom stated that a bad customer experience would only lose you 7 customers. That was in the days of Monologue. This is age of Dialogue. The Internet and Blogs can cost you all of them. This is age of Dialogue. Genuine Dialogue. Every company who has tried ghost blogs has had their asses handed to them. We are smart and getting smarter every day. Our bullshit detectors will ferret you out and thousands of voices will point and laugh. You cannot spin your way out of this.
Marketeers call us Reputation Terrorists. You always denigrate what you fear. We are your best hope to sell things that work, the fastest product testers, and will probably tell you things about your products you never thought of.
If you want to find out what your customers want, just ask. Because we don’t take dictation anymore.
The truth is people have a right to be mad. 99% of all marketers are rude as hell. And 99% of the messages they send are utter crap.
With the advent of push button publishing (some call it blogging), the average citizen has found a way to be heard above the din. Found a way to fight back. A way to go to the window and yell, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”