Good versus evil marketing

What might work for beer doesn't really work for enterprise IT

I have worked on the technical side of enterprise IT for decades, frequently in roles where I have supported sales and marketing in some way. In some companies, engineers think of all sales and marketing as the enemy. I had a boss early in my career who modified that to say, “sales is always the enemy, but marketing can be educated.” I have developed an even more nuanced view, reflecting both my admiration for sales (a topic for another day) and a key distinction in marketing.  For simplicity, I’ll consider a company with a single product, but the analysis applies equally well to multi-product companies, companies that sell services, or even companies that offer a mixture of products and services. I have only validated this perspective in the world of enterprise IT, so I don’t know how broadly it might apply outside that domain.

At least in my world, I find it useful to distinguish between good marketing and evil marketing. Good marketing consists of understanding the merits of the product, and who or what it's good for; then, based on that understanding, effectively communicating that information. Evil marketing, in contrast, consists of imagining that your product does something that it doesn't, or wishing that your product could do something that it doesn't, and communicating those untruths. It can also consist of knowing full well what your product can do, but “spinning” the messaging to prospects in misleading or downright false ways.

I continue to be surprised by how common it is for marketing teams to be engaged in some kind of deception. One origin of such deception is relatively innocent: the relevant product may be quite complex, and it may be hard to know all the relevant limitations. How does that feature really work? When will that feature be delivered? When will that other feature really work correctly? These are among the questions that matter to the customer and to the engineers building the product, but may not occur to someone trying to craft an engaging story.

Even when the answers are made available, they may not seem particularly important, or they may feel like distractions from the main point. Some of my marketing colleagues at a previous company were fond of the saying, “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” That approach has some merit to it if you are concerned about losing an important overall point among a flurry of distracting factoids, but it’s potentially a slippery slope from there to saying, “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind’s made up.”

 Alongside a simple lack of knowledge, there can be dynamics relating to what’s easy or hard to do. For example, a prospect may talk about a claimed feature of a competitor; it’s easy in the context of wanting to win the sale (or at least continue the discussion) to respond by either saying that you have something just like that claimed feature, or even that you have something that's better. In contrast, it can be quite hard to understand what the actual state of the product is or to articulate it accurately. It’s especially hard if the reality is that the competitor is ahead in a way that can’t be matched; but it’s better to acknowledge the gap and find a way of selling around it than to pretend to capabilities that don’t really exist.

One of the roots of evil marketing seems to be the way that marketing works in other domains. Arguably the most impressive feats of marketing involve the creation of lifestyles or value propositions that are unrelated to a product’s actual characteristics. The classic examples here are soft drinks and beer, but you can probably think of others. With soft drinks, flavored carbonated sugar water is the key to a vibrant active life; with beer, the consumption of a mildly alcoholic beverage creates stupendous attractiveness to desirable sexual partners. In domains like these, it's unappealing to simply characterize your product’s attributes and to be straightforward about them. After all, most beers are effectively somewhat interchangeable. Even the ways in which beers are genuinely distinct are not necessarily easy to characterize in a way that would encourage the right consumers to find them. One can recognize taste differences between beers without necessarily knowing how to either speak clearly about those differences or to understand what someone else is saying about those differences. Another way of thinking about this is that beer marketers aren’t really marketing beer as a beverage – they’re finding ways to have beer purchases signal something about status or lifestyle.

When it comes to largely undifferentiated products that are readily substitutable for one another, it is understandable that the marketing function has more to do with creating an aura and less to do with effective communication. But within the world of enterprise IT, that path seems ultimately self-defeating. In most situations, buyers of enterprise IT want the products to work as advertised – something that is surprisingly rare. At one company that I joined about twenty years ago, it was striking to observe the enthusiasm of the sales teams at having a product that actually worked. (My naïve question to them: is that unusual? Their consistent answer: oh, any company you work for, the product never works.)

People can try to build some sort of dynamic lifestyle or cool community around an enterprise IT product; but all too often, the exciting and sexy value proposition is not real. Although it’s not nearly as much fun for the marketing team, the customer probably cares more about the product functioning correctly than about being part of a glamorous world of supermodels. In the complex world of enterprise IT, the reality is that slogans and positioning and top-level value proposition are only going to be enough to start a conversation. Closing the deal then requires many additional follow-on conversations, as well as some hands-on activities (usually called proofs of concept, or PoCs).

The trouble with evil marketing is that the first part of that lengthy engagement with a prospect involves a discovery process. The initial claims turn out to be wildly misleading, or they wind up being hedged in such a way as to leave a bad taste in the prospect’s mouth. It seems ultimately self-defeating in a world of evaluations and PoCs to put effort into the exciting but incorrect messaging of evil marketing.

In contrast, with good marketing, there is no reversal or disappointment. Instead, you can be in a position where your product just looks better as the prospect learns more. And as with other areas of life, a key advantage of telling the truth is that there’s no need to track or coordinate the lies that are being told.