What Marketing Could Become…

I started this post a while back calling it “I really hate what marketing has become…” And I planned to talk about a lot of terrible things marketers are doing without even really thinking about it. But then I attended a very uplifting StoryBrand Marketing Summit and I can now see two paths forward.

First of all, the amount of marketing tools entering the market is staggering and they claim to do things like this —

“Reveal the most interested buyers on & off your site — then target them with plays tailored to their individual buyer’s journey.”

“Identify your anonymous website visitors. Push them to Hubspot or Salesforce to trigger workflows.”

“Zoom in on real people within your target accounts to know who’s in-market, uncover their buyer intent, and take precise, timely actions.”

Wow – that’s a lot of assumption and invasion of privacy if you ask me. (They didn’t but really should). So if someone is browsing anonymously, marketers believe it is their right to know about it, identify who that is and stalk them digitally via their “workflows”

That is probably the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life. Because, no one builds strong long-term relationships by stalking people. If you try it in your personal life, you will be dealing with the police very soon—and not the fun ones with Sting and Stu Copeland.

So I thought these thoughts and wanted to share them with you —

Who is in charge here? — the customer or the marketer?

From these tools, we can see that the marketer DOES NOT trust in the customer’s real need for their product so we need to treat them like a dementia patient who may have forgotten all about us.

What if INSTEAD of all of this we just:

CREATED VALUE
HELPED PEOPLE
BUILT UP RELATIONSHIPS
TRUSTED THEM — and ourselves when the right time to buy might be?

What if we did ACTUAL marketing again?
What if we CARED about that?

And then I attended the StoryBrand Marketing Summit and heard from amazing luminaries all-day including Donald Miller, Alex Cattoni, Marcus Sheridan and Jay Schwedlson PLUS the incredible Seth Godin (who started the world thinking about permission-based marketing back in the early 90s.)

I saw a VERY different look at marketing.

Seth said, “Stories are the original human technology. Stories are about feelings and emotions that cause people to make a change happen.”

He asked us “What’s the change we seek to make?”
and “Who the people we are here to serve?”

Marketing as a profession simply DOES NOT think like this (if they think at all while executing automation).

But it gave me hope. Even in this glut of garbage content AI-driven world, we can still serve people and THAT is what marketing is really supposed to do. We may execute differently. We may use new tools, but I hope that we use them for good and not just for sales. Sales will always come when the RELATIONSHIP is strong but you can’t hurry it and you can’t force it.

And that’s a vision of marketing’s future that can bring us some hope.