Marketing Weasels (and how not to become one)

Some weeks back, the folks at 7Up issued a press release tied to a news story about strange lights in the night sky over parts of Florida and the American Southwest.

The full press release (along with a weasely thrashing) can be found here: http://marketingweasels.blogspot.com/2008/05/marketing-weasels-hiding-behind-pr.html

The point is that press releases that are nothing more than thinly disguised attempts at product placement, or worse, outright sales promotion, have the exact opposite affect than is intended by the Marketing Weasels that employ this technique.

In the 70's and 80's, cheap "How-to" marketing books would preach that a company could easily get loads of free advertising in the form of publicity, just by sending out press releases about their products to media outlets. This never worked. Ask anyone who worked in media at the time and they'll tell you that all of these faxes (yes - there really were such machines in use then) went straight into the trash bin. All of them. The only thing this technique did was waste paper.

Fast forward to today: Nowadays, a company gets the hairbrained notion that all they have to do is come up with an "over the top" idea (at least for them), put out a press release on the internet, and it will instantly go viral. No cost, no work - just tons and tons of sales.

It never works this way.

Instead, the company trying to force something viral comes across as looking like an aging hipster, that thinks they're cool, but are secretly despised by all the younger people they are around. And in this metaphor, the younger people are your customers.

Marketing Weasels will tell you that you can get something for nothing - well, except for the 'small' fee you have to pay them.

Don't listen to them. Good marketing, good advertising, and good PR all cost good money.

You know this.

Don't be fooled into thinking you can somehow game the system. The system has been around a lot longer than you have and knows more than you ever will.

Marketing Weasels are the hipster with the combover and the plaid sportscoat, talking about how he's "down wit cho." Marketing weasels that misuse PR will try to sell you on the idea of free internet publicity and viral campaigns and such nonsense.

Ignore them. If you have something NEW to say - a new product, a new hire, a new building - use a reputable PR firm to get the word out in a positive way. And adjust your expectations. Just because your story about a new manufacturing facility is picked up a bunch of times does not mean that your product will automatically start flying off the shelves. That's not what PR is about. Your ROI on a PR campaign will look a lot different than that of a traditional ad campaign, which in turn will look vastly different from an SEO/SEM campaign.

Your customers will see through your attempts to bamboozle them with come-ons and sales pitches disguised as something else. Most of them won't complain or even mention that they're on to your weasely ways.

They'll just go to your competition.