I was out at an event last night for a non-profit organization where I am a board member, and they had a keynote speaker who was very much of the motivational variety. I'm too cynical to really get into such things, and I find all the ranting without any substance boring. This was a guy that should have had some interesting things to say (if his background was accurate), but instead we got a bunch of rah-rah about how important our cause is and how we all need to buy in and help out. Well, duh. Most people in the room were volunteers, so we wouldn't be out at this thing if we didn't believe in the cause.
All that was pretty much as expected. What was more disconcerting was this guy's frequent disparaging of "big marketing campaigns." The group putting on the event is involved in reorganizing child and family social services, bringing the disparate providers together into a few neighborhood centers where families can access a number of different services in one place. It is a huge initiative, involving three levels of government, private and non-profit service providers...over 100 organizations in all. We were told, over and over, that the effort to do this must be "relational," which is apparently a word he has coined to mean based on face-to-face contact and individual relationships. What we definitely do not need, apparently, is some big marketing campaign. Don't make the mistake of relying on some big marketing campaign. His voice dripped with derision just saying the words.
So a huge project involving dozens of disparate actors and relying on public involvement and support is highly unsuited for a big marketing campaign? What are you going to do, have lunch with every single person involved every time there is something to say to the group? Are you going to generate awareness and brand the project and achieve buy-in by becoming each person's best friend? Give me a break. A big marketing campaign is exactly what this project will need, and all this buffoon was doing was tapping some knee-jerk reaction against marketing that exists in the minds of non-profit do-gooders who equate it with manipulation, dishonesty and (gasp!) profit-driven capitalism.
Guess what, there is a reason why people use marketing when they want to make money. Because it works.
This isn't the first time I've heard the derision against marketing and advertising from Mr. Charisma speakers like this guy. They are salesmen who make their living scamming people into parting with money in return for very little value. Of course they don't believe in putting a message out to the masses. If the masses ever got a look at their message they might start talking about it and comparing notes...and its flaws would soon be revealed and talked about as well. Better to get people one-on-one or in small groups where you can browbeat them into signing before they have a chance to cool off.
Don't get me wrong, I have great respect for what salesmen do. I should, I was one for 10 years. Someone who can stand up in front of another person and get that person to buy into his point has a powerful, valuable skill. However, there is just no way that person can be in more than one place at one time, no matter how godlike his ego has become. Creating demand across a market is the purview of marketing and advertising. Fulfilling that demand in one-to-one conversations is what sales is all about. There is no reason for one to hack on the other, in fact, each should be the others' biggest supporter.
The dark truth, however, is that most salesmen see themselves as in competition with marketers for scarce company resources. Every dollar the boss pays to an advertising agency is a dollar he isn't given as commission, and every success of the advertising agency counts as a point in an argument against his existence. If people just start calling in their orders, who needs a big, fancy salesman taking a big slice of the profits? That's why salesmen always insist the company is doomed without the relationships they hold, even as some of the biggest and most profitable companies on earth use pimply teenagers to sell their goods and huge, multi-million dollar marketing campaigns to generate demand. Companies that work in the reverse manner tend to be smaller, poorer and not growing.
