The Bitter Pill

Marketing is not complicated.

Marketers try to make it seem more complicated than it is, so they can justify their parasitic career choice, but despite all their self-important puffery, marketing is just not that hard. Whatever you’re trying to market, one simple rule will make your marketing campaign — and your product — successful. Ready for it?

Make it suck less.

Make it suck less than the previous version. Make it suck less than the competitor’s version. Make it suck less.

Everything from cell phones to frozen dinners fall short of even the most meager of expectations, and make life worse instead of better. In other words, they suck. The sad fact is that most consumers are so inundated with sucky products they would hardly know what to do with one that didn’t suck.

Which is why companies that put out products that don’t suck seem to build instant and devoted followings. What do Apple, JetBlue and Google have in common? Generally speaking, they don’t suck. Which comes really close to making them great.

People want to spend their money. America is a consumerist society. We’re all little credit-card carrying buyers, intent on spending our dough, even if we haven’t earned it yet. It’s what we do.

So marketing to us should be easy. We want to spend our money. We really do. But when try to convince us to buy your product, do us a favor, please.

Make it suck less.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 5:34 am and is filed under Business, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.