I’ve been reading the excellent Ad Contrarian blog, and a recent post on whether to tug on your target customer’s emotional or logical strings made me realize I needed to issue two warnings for my blog.
First warning: Some of the ideas I write about here are irrelevant to a significant portion of the cases you might apply them to. No two businesses are alike – especially across industries – so beware of immutable rules. Use common sense and focus on creating a strategy that logically demonstrates how spending money on marketing will end up making you more money than you spent. The rest is just details.
Second warning: I use annoying words with fuzzy meanings – like “awareness” and “activation” – which marketers often abuse to show how smart they are instead of explaining their ideas in simple conversational English.
I know I’m guilty of this dreaded industry speak, but I need to use these words – as I think many good marketers do – as shorthand so I don’t needlessly explain topics that are already understood. Still, I imagine it’s obnoxious when you read industry speak and haven’t seen me define the words concretely.
I’m going to solve this by putting together a persistent reference section I can link to whenever I feel like dropping some knowledge. You may find other definitions for the terms elsewhere, but I’ll do my best to remain internally consistant.