Because marketing can solve 90% of your problems
We found this PowerPoint slide back in 2000, when our whole lives seemed to be just one big PowerPoint presentation. I still think it’s the best one ever, with its gradient fill background and customized bullets.
PROTIP: If you put it somewhere in Hour 2 of your presentation, no one will really notice.
(NOTE: I wasn’t sure where this came from, since it’s been on my hard drive forever. But I just did a search and I think it originated here.)
People who think advertising is a new thing that is somehow ‘evil’ haven’t read any history books lately.
I’ve borrowed this excellent image from Zazzle.com, where you can make customized stuff in small quantities. They’ll be less annoyed about this if you click here to visit their site!
(Today I ran into someone I knew in high school and they seemed appalled that I’d ended up in marketing, so I dug this up from my old blog on ERE.net and I’ve reprinted it here. It was originally part of a series on personal branding, but I think it works fine by itself.)
Advertising: The profession everyone loves to hate
I’ve spent my entire working life in 3 industries that people think are filled with cheats, charlatans and idiots: Real estate, advertising, and recruiting.
So I’m used to the faces people make – as though they’d just sucked on a particularly sinful lemon – when they hear what I do for a living. Many people can’t restrict themselves to just the faces, either, and are happy to tell me that all real estate agents/advertising people/recruiters are shallow, materialistic, fake, incompetent, mean, and self-absorbed.
If I’m meeting them at, say, a dinner party where the other guests work in non-profits, government, academia or healthcare, there often ensues a lengthy discussion on how advertising types – and the evil corporations they represent – is pretty much responsible for the downfall of society.
The anti-branding position goes like this:
“If marketing people didn’t keep trying to convince people that they ‘needed’ 8 televisions, 3 cars, a 4000 sq foot home with a 100-ft frontage, several $1000 handbags and a perfect size 2 figure, we’d all be much happier, society would be a meritocracy, eating disorders would be eliminated, and China would have uncensored internet access.”
Thanks to the popularity of Mad Men, this is usually followed up with some comment about how shady advertising types are a recent invention of the past 50 years, and that we need to be stamped out before the sky actually does fall in.
Except that’s not really true…
Let’s just break it down:
“…8 televisions, 3 cars, a 4000 sq ft home, etc.”
Guess what? Once you have enough to eat, are safe from predators, have a roof over your head and sufficient clothing to keep from dying of exposure, everything else you own is just stuff you want, not stuff you need.
“…with a 100-ft frontage…”
The human desire for land precedes advertising agencies by about 10,000 years, as evidenced by about a zillion wars over various patches of ground throughout the whole of human history.
“…we’d all be much happier, society would be a meritocracy…”
If there were any actual examples, in all of recorded human history, of societies in which happiness was rife and a meritocracy prevailed, I’d have an easier time believing this.
“…eating disorders would be eliminated…”
I hate unrealistic airbrushed models as much as anyone, but eating disorders have been documented since the Middle Ages, and there’s evidence to suggest they’ve been around for more than 10,000 years.
“…advertising types are a recent invention of the past 50 years…”
Advertising and marketing has been around as long as humans have – archeologists have found evidence of marketing messages in Ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, and classified ads in Ancient Rome. The first clear-cut examples of ‘modern’ advertising in the 15th century, and the first newspaper ad appeared in 1622 or so.
In other words: As soon as the first human wanted to get other humans to ‘do stuff’ (help with the boar-killing expedition, believe in their god, buy their corn, or fight their war), marketing’s existed.
What have we learned?
Since human society has managed to survive – nay, thrive! – 10,000 years of marketing and 500+ years of advertising, I feel certain that society is in no imminent danger of collapse.
Don’t know who created this, but I found it here.
In many ways I’m lucky: I’ve worked on website projects for more than 15 years now, and I’m married to a web developer who knows a lot about all kinds of different coding languages. So while I don’t design websites myself, it’s pretty tough for an unscrupulous web designer to pull a fast one on me and leave me with a hideous, broken, or grossly overpriced website.
Unfortunately, I’m feeling like I’m in a tiny minority. In the past couple of weeks I’ve come across a number of new clients – and businesses which can’t afford to be new clients, because they just spent their whole marketing budget on a disastrous website – who are in big trouble because they put their faith in someone who claimed to know what they were doing, but didn’t.
Thanks to tools like WordPress, designing and building (basic) websites is easier (and cheaper) than it’s ever been. That should be great news for clients, but instead it seems to have created a whole army of nincompoops who think that anyone who’s able to download a WordPress template and stick the client’s logo at the top is suddenly a ‘professional’ web designer.
It’s making the rest of us look bad, and I want you to stop.
In case you’re not sure if you’re actually a ‘professional’ website designer or not, I offer these 7 criteria. If you’re doing any of these things, to any of your clients, just stop right now. Go find another career. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re going to have to find another career sooner or later, because your clients aren’t as stupid as you think, and eventually they’ll wake up to your nonsense.
1. You play fast and loose with your client’s logo
If you can’t manage to use your client’s logo on a website without stretching it, changing the font on the tagline, or using it consistently across different website pages, you need to think about being an accountant or something, because your sense of aesthetics is insufficient for any career involving the word ‘design’. Your client’s logo is often the basis of their brand equity, and for small businesses it may be all they’ve got. Change it and at best you make them look unprofessional; at worst you’ve cost them real money.
2. You start using random colour schemes that have nothing to do with the client’s brand identity
I’ve written about this before: When you start injecting new colours all over the place, you dilute the client’s brand identity and set a pattern of inconsistency that can cause a whole lot of problems. Yes, it can be hard to create an engaging website if the client’s logo is monochromatic – but it’s up to you to identify that challenge and help the client develop an official colour palette. Adding random rainbow backgrounds is not the answer.
3. You use all kinds of different fonts…
…and then pretend not to know what the client means when they say their website “doesn’t seem to look cohesive, somehow”.
I got a call this week from a couple of women who were frustrated with the look of their new website but they didn’t know why and their website designer wasn’t returning their calls. The biggest problem? There were 4 different fonts on the homepage alone, none of which was the font actually used in their logo+tagline image. It’s one thing to use a serif for the headings and a sans-serif for the body copy, just to offer a little visual interest, but more than that and the whole thing starts to look like a random collage. And you should know better.
4. You grab random stock photos and then don’t bother to customize them in any way
Ah, stock photography and the internet. In many ways it’s great: These days, you don’t have to spend $10k on custom photography when you need shots of people on a beach or something. But stock photography almost always looks like stock photography: People can tell that that attractive, culturally diverse group of people gathered around a computer screen, with strong blue tones and a white background is something you found on iStock.
It makes the site look generic, and worse, makes people wonder if the content on the site is similarly generic. It’s fine to use stock photos – just make sure you make them your own.
5. You lie to your client because you assume they’re too stupid to know any better
The client is not stupid. In fact, the client may be a whole lot smarter than you are, and more than capable of creating their own website if they weren’t so busy conducting symphonies or finding a cure for malaria. So don’t lie to them just because you think anyone who doesn’t know the difference between html and a CSS must be an idiot. If you can’t bring yourself to refrain from lying simply on moral grounds, consider this: Sooner or later your client will figure out that you’re not being honest with them, and they’ll call someone like me instead.
6. You tell the client that something “isn’t possible” when the truth is you just don’t know how to do it
The bottom line is that when it comes to websites, almost anything is possible, given sufficient brainpower, time and budget. Sometimes you’re on a deadline; sometimes the client just doesn’t have the budget. But if you’re telling the client stuff like “WordPress doesn’t allow you to change the background colour” or “Flash and html don’t work on the same website” or “It doesn’t matter if the site doesn’t work in Firefox – no one uses that any more” simply because you don’t know how to solve the problem, you’re lying, and you need to stop it (see #5).
7. You refuse to give your client their files or passwords even after they’ve paid you for the work
Among real professionals, the industry standard is that once a client has paid you in full for your website design, they own it. That means they own the files, the access to those files, the images, the passwords – everything, unless you have a prior agreement in writing. Refusing to give them these things (or not bothering to get back to them when, a year from now, they need something from you) in order to keep them beholden to you is unethical – and could set you up for legal consequences.
And that’s what I have to say about that.
I’m often brought in to help companies transition from their very first branding efforts to one that’s more suitable for the ways in which they’re growing: They may have set up a basic website when they first started, but now they have a few employees, a few big clients, and they need a brand that is a little more polished and sophisticated.
As I’ve said before, I think that great brands are built from the inside out. The best brands seem organic and almost inevitable, because they’re an accurate reflection of the business and of the people who work there. Which means that when you undertake a ‘rebranding’ exercise, it’s important to engage employees in the process.
In my experience, the best way to do this is to gather everyone (or key stakeholders, depending on the size of the organization) together for a workshop session (with pizza is best) in which we discuss the functional and emotional benefits of the company and the current brand identity. Employees become invested in the new brand; more importantly, the session can help identify key insights which form the basis of the new brand identity.
It’s important that these workshops are productive and don’t deteriorate into free-for-all ‘brainstorming’ sessions which can drone on for ages and don’t really go anywhere.
So we stick to gathering answers to – and controlled discussion about – these questions:
Depending on the size of the group, this exercise will take 2-3 hours – but will generate a huge amount of internal brand loyalty and investment as you move forward.
This week Belvedere Vodka got in a lot of trouble when it posted this print advertisement on its Facebook page:
Maybe the person who wrote the tagline thought it would be a ‘cheeky’ double-entendre – in questionable taste, but maybe okay if it was used with a photo of, say, two obviously gay men and used in the bathroom of a downtown dance club.
This, for example, doesn’t bother me (or, probably, anyone) nearly as much:
(The line here is “There is nothing more satisfying than Effen on a plane.”)
But when you stick a “going down” line on a photo of a man apparently forcibly restraining a woman, and neither of them are displaying facial expressions consistent with lighthearted, consensual fun, you’ve got a problem. When posting it on your Facebook page brings a firestorm of comments about how it depicts rape, you start to look like you’ve lost the plot.
When the blogosphere went crazy, Jason Lundy, SVP of Global Marketing for Belvedere, issued an apology and pulled the ad. That’s fine, I guess, but it misses the point: This ad wasn’t the misguided brainchild of a single person, or even a single company. A whole team of people had to create and approve this ad before it ever saw a Facebook page:
Having worked in a number of big ad agencies, on big brands, I can tell you that this is probably only a partial list of the people who had input on this piece before it ever got converted into a jpg and posted in public.
So at least 10 people – and probably a whole lot more – who work on the Belvedere marketing account decided that this ad was a good idea. Apparently they still don’t think it was a big deal, because Belvedere’s ad agency, Last Exit (an interesting name, in the circumstances), still has Belvedere front and center on their website, and they haven’t bothered to post anything about the ad on their blog about the controversy, either.
Now the woman in the ad is suing Belvedere and parent company LVMH – she says the photo they used is actually a still from a short film she made with a friend, that Belvedere used without permission.
Kinda makes you wonder what the heck goes on in team meetings over at Belvedere and Last Exit. Perhaps they’ve been sampling the product a little too early in the day.