The audience matters most

A good friend of mine, Jack Timmons, sent me this parable today:

A disappointed Coca Cola salesman returns from his Middle East assignment. A friend asked, "Why weren't you successful with the Arabs?" The salesman explained: "When I got posted to the Middle East, I was very confident that I would make a good sales pitch as Cola is virtually unknown there. But, I had a problem I didn't know to speak Arabic. So, I planned to convey the message through three posters...

• First poster: A man lying in the hot desert sand...totally exhausted and fainting.
• Second poster: The man is drinking our Cola.
• Third poster: Our man is now totally refreshed.

And Then these posters were pasted all over the place. "Then that should have worked!" said the friend. "It should have!?" said the salesman. "But I didn't realize that Arabs read from right to left!!"

A powerful lesson for all of us :-). Marketing is the conduit between the customer and the company. It needs to understand both really well and be able to build a lasting bridge between them.

A public speaking coach once told me that great communication is not about you getting across what you wanted to. It's about understanding your audience, their interests and needs, and giving them what they need. His metaphor for this is single people at a bar or party; the "successful" ones are those that are most compelling to their target audience, not necessarily the best looking, dressed, etc.  

Marketing succeeds when the message resonates with your audience, not your management (who are often far from the target audience). But in most large corporations, we find ourselves in the situation where we are required get buy-in from the execs before going out with a campaign. And all-to-often, the execs feel like they need to add value by providing input on creative, sometimes to the point of totally polluting what was once a great thing.

One way to overcome this is to have already done in-market testing with the target audience, and reviewing that as well as the objectives of the campaign with the executives, and then further explaining their role (not to critique the content, but approve the strategy), and if they persist, use the research to defend your approach based on what resonates with the audience.