IVstudios wrote:
I suppose I ought to clarify that though I usually find marketing people frustrating to work with, 9 times out of 10 their suggestions improve the overall piece (my previous complaint notwithstanding), or are at least necessarily from a legal standpoint. They're the guys who know all the ins and outs of the contracts they have with sponsors and know who's logos have to go where and be how big.
I can tell you there are people who have a knack for marketing (myself being very much NOT one of those people). Finding customers is hard and usually involves less coming up with one brilliant idea and more just keep trying things until you find what works.
As an example, one of the most famous marketing blunders of all time was New Coke. I mean, what were those people thinking? How could those idiots not see that people wouldn't buy their crappy product? Except that in every taste test they did before the release the customers all raved about how great the new flavor was, and then those same people turned around and refused to buy it.
Marketing people may seem crazy, but it's largely because they're trying to sell to humans. And humans are crazy.
I dunno... it's good if your experiences have been positive, but I've only grown more frustrated.
It's not like there are always big blunders like New Coke, it's that most of the time, their work is completely irrelevant. It's only through enormous amounts of money, repetition,. repetition, repetition, and of course, spinning of information, that some of these turn into successes.
You said it yourself: enormous amounts of tries and false starts before they step on one idea that work. This all may even sound not so bad until you realise that companies spend as much money (or less) on marketing as they do on actually making their product. So basically, enormous amounts of money thrown to people whose success rate equals randomly opening a dictionary. To me, a successful marketeer should have a success rate that is required in any other field; Would you settle down for a musician who makes one good song out of ten? People are crazy, but there are still musicians, directors, producers, writers etc etc, who figure out their craziness enough to be constantly successful. But there are different rules for marketing, not because it's a profession where results are somehow more unpredictable, but because curently it's The Profession.
There's also information spinning. We have here an add campaign which is in media touted as very successful, but it's hard to find a person who isn't irritated by it. Response to this is: "Well, it's successful because people are noticing it." So - what you're saying is, between choosing whether to make Gunnerkrieg Court or Electric Retard, you choose the later, and you honestly believe that success of those two is equal? What's more you expect us to believe that you could have made the former if you wanted? The idea that shock advertising works is dubious, oportunistic, and proven by singing out one successful case out of 50. The "no publicity is bad publicity" mindset is responsible for tons of crap being shoveled into our heads every day, more than anything else. In marketing, success is not thought to be correlated to quality, which amkes as excuse for most of them not to strive for quality at all.
I can name a lot of examples where mistakes that only marketing experts with their undeserved confidence could make (the only reason I'm not is, I don't wanna leave personal accounts that could affect other people on internet), which are then justified with one of stock rationalizations: "It will work in long term", "it actually worked, except that you don't notice it", "it should have worked"... or in Coke's case, "It's people's fault, not ours". Never mind investing the fate of the company into opinions of notoriously unreliable test groups (provided that story is not yet another spin).
Well actually I do have to say that there are different stories too, and in fact even marketing has people with more golden ideas than bad ones. It's just that it's a line of work where it's shamelessly easy to bullshit, where you get away with everything, where you can get paid well to do work that is mostly irrelevant, and where you're in position to preach and teach lessons to people who are way more qualified in the subject than you are.
(Except for some senior roles, which are impossible to get when you don't have a huge amount of industry experience.)
