COMMENT
Marketing. Everyone has an opinion.
And they will state it forcefully, whether they know what they are talking about or not.
Marketing is one of those elusive beasts, a bit like the big cat stalking the Otways. You can see signs of it and get an idea, but it always hard to pin down.
And it’s this very nebulous nature of marketing that enables everyone and their dog to have a say and believe their opinion counts.
Experienced marketers alternatively groan, shake their heads in disbelief and roll their eyes when people who have absolutely no marketing traction try to tell them how to go about it.
The end product – that people actually see – is always subjective and therefore you will always get people who love it or loathe it, along with a group who are lukewarm. This is the typical bell curve response to marketing.
But any marketing campaign, if it has the right budget, is the product of extensive market research so it is aimed at the right target audience, using the medium most likely to reach them with a relevant message.
A piece of marketing is not necessarily aimed at you, even though you will see it and may well have an opinion about it.
As a professional who has jumped the divide between journalism and marketing and public relations a few times, I have been on the receiving end of that sort of criticism from people who had an opinion but nothing solid to base it upon.
Often they were the ones in charge of the budget, making the task twice as difficult.
And when a marketing campaign is in the public domain, using our dollars, it becomes infinitely more difficult.
Public voices with no idea of the research behind a campaign will scream loudest.
The only definition of success, however, is not what some person’s or organisation’s opinion is – it is whether the target audience was reached with the right message, which is where post campaign research comes in.
A Tale of Sleepy Hollow received 10,000 you tube hits in 24 hours, so that’s not a bad start.
Ironically, maybe the outspoken critics have done their job after all.
– John Van Klaveren
