Echoes of recent political campaigns in business marketing
On the train into London this morning I overhead one side of a phone conversation. It was a crowded carriage but the guy on the phone was sitting across a narrow aisle and loud enough to distract me from my John Berger essays. In truth, I was intrigued by his words.
He worked for a company with an IT product. I suspect it was something to do with security and he was bemoaning the fact that a number of potential clients — banks by the sound of it — were buying competitor products that were both inferior and couldn’t even deliver what was promised.
The fault lay in the messaging for his company’s product. Apparently — according to my unintentional informant — the messaging was out of date and uninspiring. A bit of a double whammy on the marketing front, obviously.
What seemed to piss of the guy on the phone was that the competitors were plainly telling lies about what their products could do. Sound familiar? Perhaps we’ve entered a post-truth marketing era to match the Brexit and Trump political campaigns.
Joking aside (is it a joke?), it’s clear that when companies — such as banks — are desperate for answers to their perceived problems, the strongest message has a good chance of winning the contract. That gives the more ethical of the businesses time and opportunity to improve their products and attempt to catch up with their claims. (This, at least, is one difference from the ‘Leave’ campaigners in the UK’s EU Referendum, who had no substance with which to back up their exaggerated claims.)
Two things came to mind. One; it appears that there was only a difference in degree between the recent ‘nasty’ political campaigns and standard business practice. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise, given the corporate-dominated societies in which we now live. Two; when politics becomes simply another business strategy, the end of democratic institutions is well and truly nigh.
I followed the guy off the train and lost him somewhere in the crowd at Victoria. I’m in no doubt that he will have headed into meetings today full of indignation and a determination to make sure his company was on the winning side in the next client pitch.
I hope he doesn’t have to wait years for the chance to make it right.
For my part, I caught a bus that got stuck in some horrendous traffic jam along Piccadilly. In the end, I got off the bus and walked, which was when the rain started.
