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The Cardinal Sin of Marketing

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We live in a world of an absolute abundance of information and the only way we can cope with it all is to ignore as much as we can. In this Vlog, Grant explains the marketer’s greatest mistake when trying to overcome this barrier.

What is the cardinal sin of marketing?

Well, not a lot of people will confess to it and it’s not easily forgiven.

The cardinal sin of marketing is…. irrelevance.

You see, if you’re relevant you can get away with anything. If you were to cold call me about mobile phones half an hour before I was going out to choose one, I would take the call.

Similarly, if your holiday brochure came through my front door the weekend I was going to choose a holiday, I’d look at it. Of course, the chances of that happening are slim.

You see today, we live in a world of an absolute abundance of information, and the only way we can cope, is by building digital walls around us to ensure that we filter the information that gets through. Therefore, when something comes across, which is completely irrelevant to us it just irritates.

Think about the irrelevant TV ads, cold calls, and direct mails that we used to be fairly apathetic about. Today however you get a spam text on your phone and you feel positively violated. Therefore, in order to ensure you’re relevant, you have to think about the challenges your customers will have and the context in which they will occur.

So how could a company market their latest mobile phone? If one of the audiences for this mobile provider are business owners, one of the challenges they will have is ensuring they always have the most appropriate mobile phone and the context of being in order to run their business as effectively as they can. Therefore, this company could put together a monthly list of the latest innovations that every business owner should know about. In that way it will always be relevant.

Or let’s take a recruitment agent. They may understand that one of the challenges their customers have is how to recruit the right candidate. The context of that might be high business growth. So producing a tip sheet about how to recruit efficiently will resonate with that audience.

So make sure you’re always relevant and then you can get back to the more forgivable sins like overeating and being lazy.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English

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