Marketing To Customers Who Don’t Say “Duh!”

Maybe marketing doesn’t have to be dumbed down to be successful. That’s the implication of a recent Stanford University study on literacy.

Clive Thompson of Wired quotes Stanford Professor Andrea Lunsford and summarizes what she says about the impact of the Internet on college student’s prose: “’I think we’re in the middle of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,’ she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text.”

What this could mean for marketing

On one hand, critics of marketing have always claimed that it appeals to the lowest common denominator. Supposedly, marketers act as if customers have the attention spans of oysters, are baffled by sentences with more than six words, and are indifferent to any kind of logical expression of features and benefits. This is the result of a combination of:
a) marketers’ cynicism and venality.
b) the Internet, and all of its trivial distractions from “serious” thought.
c) declining educational standards. (Critics have been complaining about declining educational standards since the time of the ancient Greeks. It’s a wonder we don’t all have the brains of single celled organisms by now.)

On the other hand, some of us do pay attention to David Ogilvy’s famous advice that “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.” Evidence that this point of view is closer to the truth include the legendary Volkswagen Think Small campaign and the current Mac vs. PC campaign.

No more lowest common “dumbnominator”

Now the Stanford Study implies there is hope for intelligent marketing. Because people who write well have the skills to read (or listen or watch) well. They can pay attention, understand ideas and follow a chain of logic in the marketing communications we send to them – if they want to.

“Can” is the key word here. Some marketers forget that customers don’t have to pay attention, understand and so forth. Customers already have their own lives and other marketers’ messages competing for their attention, so they just don’t have time for marketing communication that’s complicated, in love with itself rather than with the customer, clever without relevant content, or that hides the benefit or the special offer.

That’s why successful marketing should be simplified – but not dumbed down – even when it’s aimed at really smart people.  We’re not the only ones to notice this simple vs. smart paradox. Bob Schmidt of online writers’ cooperative helium.com says it well:  “Ironic, isn’t it? Using extensive writing skills to write in the most simplistic manner possible. Actually, that’s what has worked all along in the field of advertising.”

Tags: advertising, dumb, literacy, Marketing, Stanford, wired

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Alan Maites, Cool/Funny/Unusual, Marketing Communications, Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.