Imaging that all of a sudden you suspect that you might have diabetes or high blood pressure; the normal next step would be visiting a doctor to get yourself examined. Now imagine that during that visit to the doctor, he confirms your doubts, and starts scolding you for allowing yourself to indulge in consuming that much of sugar or greasy food and end his consultation with this statement … you deserve it!
I am not sure if a scenario like this has ever happened in real life, although I won’t be surprised if it does (explaining this sentence would need another article), but this scenario has taken place in a supposedly awareness campaign about diabetes!
Ironic I know, creating awareness among people about diabetes by insulting them! Noting that I am using the word ‘awareness’ loosely here, actually, not a single thing in that campaign was educating or inducing awareness. It is unfortunate that such things happen under the name of creative marketing, of education and awareness. I have always argued that marketing is a poorly understood concept in the Saudi and in the Arab market. We are yet to scratch the service when it comes to understanding what real marketing is. At its roots, it is barely about the product, the message itself, but it is about understanding those who should receive it, how they think and how they behave, and what kind of influence the marketer wants to instill in the hearts of minds of the targeted audience of his or her product.
This whole misconception of marketing has increased in the local market with the boom of social media applications; apparently, if you have a bunch of followers on Twitter, and a decent number of views on YouTube, you automatically become a marketing expert. How getting more followers, or likes, or views became a badge of marketing brilliance is beyond me. I cannot till this moment grasp the premise of so many newly created marketing agencies which are entirely dependent on a number of Twitter celebrities passing paid tweets around (usually without declaring that they are tweeting for money!), and they call that marketing!
Furthermore, getting the attention of your audience in a creative way does not, in any way, mean that your message should be delivered in an insulting or a provocative way; there is a huge difference between creativity and absurdness, between being smart and being an ignorant. Challenge your audience minds, sensory, and judgment, but you do not have to insult them along the way and call that creativity. This becomes more fundamentally obvious when the message concerns health issues and related to people’s weaknesses and vulnerability. When you have a chronic disease that is in a lot of times coded in your genes, the last thing you want to hear about is that “you deserve it!”
Interestingly though, there seem to be individuals out there who liked the idea of the campaign. Their common response was that “nice messages did not work; maybe this provocative approach would work!” For me, this is evidence that our understanding of marketing is ill-based, misinformed, we apparently lost our taste in good marketing after decades of being exposed to lousy ones!
Many researches in the field suggests that when it comes to social causes campaigns, the best approach is to call for people’s community sense, their goodness, their collective wellbeing. Use positivity and people will be persuaded to accept and interact with your message; I cannot remember one study that suggested scolding and insults as a key to reach the heart and minds of your audience. Marketing is both a science and an art. Unfortunately, some of us are ruining it for the rest.
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@smaldosari
