What Marketing Is Not

The Irish Mail on Sunday stands accused of two counts of passing off in the latest saga to hit the rapidly ailing newspaper industry. The first was its attempt to lure readers of the Sunday Tribune (which went into receivership last Wednesday) into buying its paper by adding a cover sheet which included the Sunday Tribune’s masthead and looked, for all the world, like the original. Just as flagrant was its pathetic attempt to justify this stunt as simply being a ‘marketing exercise’. It goes without saying that nowhere in the definition of marketing does it say that you should attempt to try to trick customers into buying your product by pretending to be something that you are not. That is what con artists do!

What is interesting though is what this tells us about consumer behaviour. For a con like this to work, you must catch the consumer off guard. And increasingly, what we are learning is that most of the time when consumers are shopping, they are actually off guard. Much of our consumption behaviour is automatic – we pick up the same products from the supermarket shopping aisles, go to the same petrol stations and even though we look at the menu we will regularly order the same lunch in a café. This is precisely what the Mail on Sunday was seeking to capitalize on – the tendency of Sunday newspaper buyers to pick up the same paper that they do every week. In a world of extensive consumer choices we avoid information and processing overload by taking shortcuts. And occasionally, these shortcuts can lead to a bad customer experience.

So the consumer needs to realise that they are not always as rational as they like to claim that they are. Much of what we do is automatic and driven by our subconscious motives. Smart companies understand this and constantly work to build an emotional connection between the consumer and their brands. Others just try to fool some of the people some of the time and then call it marketing!