Sometimes people are deliberately obtuse. They work hard not to see the subtlety of an argument. Because it can be easier to criticise that way.
It’s an old debating trick. As someone explained to me, the next best thing to winning is not losing. Being deliberately obtuse can keep your opponent from making his point. Play defensively…block…don’t let the other guy score. Run the clock out.
I looked this tactic up recently after reading a couple of critiques of ‘sophisticated mass marketing’. This is how sophisticated mass marketing is described in “How Brands Grow“:
“Reach all consumers of the brand’s service/product category, both with physical distribution and marketing communication. All these people are potential buyers of your brand. Reach across geographical space, time, and situations. Avoid going ‘off air’. Avoid narrow descriptions of of the brand’s target market..understand who buys, when, and how the brand fits into their lives. Stop talking about your average buyer – there is wide variety of consumers”.
Rachel Kennedy and I wrote in our textbook chapter:
“The aim should be for inclusion not exclusion. This doesn’t mean treating all customers the same. As we have discussed, marketers usually offer much customisation, many different options. They understand that their market contains different sorts of people, and that people vary in their moods and situations. But sophisticated mass marketers also looks for ways to gain scale and efficiencies..to appeal to as many category users as possible.”
Much earlier we wrote “targeting is like salt, a little bit improves the dish, too much and it’s spoilt”.
The ‘sophisticated’ bit refers to appreciating differences between buyers, and differences between buying situations. Or put plainly, don’t advertise in English to your Spanish speaking consumers.
But some critics ignore (or, attempt to refute our argument by ridiculing our use of) the word ‘sophisticated’. Which (perhaps conveniently) misconstrues the argument to “sell to everyone, tailor to no one”. Sigh.
This is another classic debating trick – building the strawman – having successfully changed the argument it is then easy to present any evidence of targeting at all as proof that sophisticated mass marketing is wrong. Take this example: “49% of IPA effectiveness award submissions claim to be targeting specific audiences” (Oldham 2016). Be that as it may, but most award submissions are single campaigns, e.g. one that clears some rotting fruit out of a warehouse, uses a new marketing tactic, or enters a new geographical area and are necessarily not the sum total of a company’s activities. Single battles may be each won street-by-street but we shouldn’t confuse a single battle with the war. One brand’s YouTube channel might be quite a hit with thousands of millennials, and might win an award, but all that cost and effort does little to build the brand’s mental and physical availability with the millions of other millennials (oh, nor with its buyers or potential buyers from other age groups).
My favourite (OK, ‘pet hate’) criticism of sophisticated mass marketing is to cite individual cases where a brand deliberately sacrificed reach for engagement or frequency and scored some sales. This is fallacious logic built on anecdote. It is like observing that the Roman Army were very successful in their day, and that their Generals consulted pecking chickens in deciding whether or not to go into battle, then saying it proves that military decisions should be based on the pecking patterns of chickens. But one cannot merely generalise from an anecdote. The success of one specific tactic in one set of conditions says nothing about the performance of any other tactic. Successful firms can have sub-optimal marketing strategies, they can even do things that are wasteful or even downright stupid – as anyone who has worked in a big corporation knows all too well.
Don’t live in a cosy world of targeted campaigns and leave brand growth to others (e.g. the CSO, CFO, CEO). You’ll never get the respect you want from senior management.