Stop grifting and start marketing

One thing I’ve always irked at is “spin”.

• Companies promoting features they haven’t got.
• Fake urgency, fake wait lists.
• Focusing only on the outcome without clarifying the inputs required.

The industry Vero is in, MarTech, is actually pretty notorious for spin.

Products in this space help marketers fill technical gaps in order to achieve their outcomes.

Selling technical products to marketers lends itself to promises: many of which can’t actually be backed up!

A friend of mine committed to a Salesforce contract for $60,000 per year a few years ago. Only to find out during implementation that the product didn’t actually do what they’d specifically been told it could. What their company needed.

They put up a big fight and managed to get out of their contract. But many aren’t so lucky.

This is an example of straight-up grift.

Don’t be like us

Like me, I imagine this story frustrates you.

Because of stories like this, for many years at Vero we made a mistake: we were so afraid of “spin” that, well, we said virtually nothing.

We never wanted to overpromise, to “talk a talk” we could not walk. This cowed us into silence.

Of course, this didn’t serve our customers, nor did it serve our business. Whilst the ethos is noble, the result wasn’t smart. It certainly wasn’t good business.

We learned our lesson the hard way: but hopefully you don’t have to. In this post, I share some reflections on how you can do marketing and avoid grifting.

Marketing != grift

Being genuine is 100% non-negotiable.

So we sat down and asked ourselves “we need to do marketing and we need to do it well: what principles will we live by to ensure we market in a way that is genuine?”

We came up with six core principles.

Clarity, not obscurity

Help your customers make an informed decision: don’t trick them into one. This principle is all about clarity, about realistic promises, about honest ROI, about explaining what is actually required to achieve success.

Great examples come from MarTech itself. So often, companies in our space sell by focusing only on the outcomes. They sell a grand vision of what’s possible to a customer and the customer, rightly, gets excited.

In these scenarios, the vendor isn’t faking it: what they’re selling can be achieved. But just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s actually achievable for a given customer.

For example, just because Amazon can serve individual-level product recommendations using the vendor you’re looking at doesn’t mean you will actually be able to achieve them too. It depends on your resources, on your context, on your stack and ability to invest.

Good marketing acknowledges this and builds trust to win customers by helping them gain a better understanding than they started with.

The opposite of clarity is to obscure. To omit. To underplay what’s really needed.

Long-term trust beats short-term wins

Sometimes we are tempted to take a shortcut. To do something that might well work but, even if it does, risks eroding the trust we’ve built with customers.

Like those times you think you’ll squeeze through the orange light. Stop. You won’t.

Trust takes time to build and no time at all to erode. We strive to remember this in all of the marketing we put out.

Show. Don’t hype.

The clearest example I can think of to demonstrate this marketing principle is Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” campaign. I’m sure we’re all familiar with ads like this:

This is the ultimate “show, don’t tell”. There’s zero doubt that Apple can walk-the-walk with what they’re marketing here: because they’re simply showing their product in action.

This principle is all about not claiming to do something you don’t actually do. Sounds simple, right? We only need to look to the current climate surrounding AI to see plenty of companies claiming an awful lot with fairly limited evidence. In fact, some have even blogged about the value of claiming you can do something you can’t quite yet do.

We’re fans of hyping what you can show. Not hyping what you can’t.

Don’t manipulate fear

Responsible, fear-based messaging:

• Acknowledges a real-world risk.
• Frames the product as a calm, empowering response.
• Respects the customer’s intelligence.

Preying on fear:

• Dramatizing worst-case scenarios.
• Using shame or inadequacy to sell.
• Creating panic.

Once again I’ll use an example from Apple. Over the last few years Apple have ramped up their marketing around data privacy. This is absolutely talking to “fear”. Fear of cyber crime and threats to our privacy.

Yet these threats are very real and accelerating. Apple’s marketing acknowledges this very real risk and doesn’t over-sell their solution, focusing once again on showing the features they’ve got that back up these claims. They don’t create panic: they provide a valuable solution.

This can also manifest in more subtle ways. Fake urgency is a classic marketing tool that manipulates via fear. We try to avoid this sort of marketing.

Respect for attention

We’ve all read a 300 page book and said “they could have said that in 30 pages”. That’s what this principle is all about.

It encompasses things like:

• Avoid unnecessary popups.
• Don’t write 2,000 words when 200 would do (yes, I’m watching my word count as I type this!)
• Focus on quality over quantity.

Turns out, our customers think like this too

Whilst we’ve made the mistake of not marketing enough in the past, none-the-less some of these principles shone through anyway and great customers found us.

Once we wrote them down, we realised that our customers share them too. Customers that don’t overhype. That care about trust. That write clearly, value time, and do good work.

Customer that makes us incredibly proud.

Join us

If you’re a marketer that resonates with these principles then adopt them in your work. Join us in pushing for the most genuine marketing you can and be loud and proud about it.

Further, if you’re looking for your next customer engagement platform / marketing automation platform and are sick of the hype cycle then check out Vero and join us with the knowledge we are committed to these principles too.