Walking around New York is an education in marketing. Nearly every surface encourages you to consume: bus kiosks, store windows, taxi toppers, handmade signs plastered on construction site walls. Some messages are direct and simple – “buy this” – while others go for subtlety or cleverness.
But I think my favorites are those messages that, in effect, try making lemonade out of lemons. I can imagine the conversations that happen in those marketing meetings: “You know, our product or service can’t really do X. How can we make that seem like a benefit to our customers?”
The one I’ve been noticing lately (on a number of bus kiosk walls and other large vertical surfaces) is a big poster for Iceland Air. It trumpets, in large letters: “Stop over in Iceland for no additional airfare.” If you go on their website and look at their flight maps, you’ll notice that they fly between a handful of cities in North America and a good number of cities in Scandinavia and Europe – but that every flight goes through Reykjavik.
So they’ve taken a bad thing (no direct flights between Europe and North America) and marketed it as a good thing (you get to stop in beautiful Iceland – and we won’t even charge you for it!) I’d be fascinated to know what percentage of people who read that poster actually come away thinking that it would be fabulous to visit Reykjavik free of charge on their way to London. Sadly, I suspect it's not high.
It seems to me that if people in marketing (or any discipline, really) would ask themselves if the messages they’re creating would actually be compelling to them, personally, a lot of marketing campaigns would never see the light of day.
An idea: if you’re about to create or implement a process, message, or approach that will directly touch your customers, stop for a moment and ask: Would I like being dealt with in this way? Would this be a compelling offer to me? If the answer is no – go back to the drawing board.