The Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing: LUST

I've read and heard a lot of folks in the marketing game discussing the fact - and it is a FACT - that the customer should always be the primary focus of your marketing efforts.

Insert Customer Here.

This is always a hot topic - on blogs, in magazines, at conferences, with consultants and speakers and what have you.  There is little disagreement on this point - customers rule.

If we all agree on this, why are we constantly talking about it?

Perhaps we are finding it so hard to make this fact actually be the truth in what we do on a daily basis.  We are certainly are talking the talk, but the walk... not so much.

It just seems so hard to keep the customer front and center in practice! How do we allow ourselves to become distracted from our customers and what they need from us?  What temptations are thrown our way to cause us to make other things top priority?

Temptation leads to sin.

Deadly sins.

That's what this series is about.   Today, let's start with a big one.

LUST for technology

Many, if not most marketers are early-adopting and high tech.  We got smart phones early, we were playing with QR Codes and NFC and mobile technology of all kinds while most people still thought the Motorola Razr was a pretty neat phone (and for the record - it was pretty neat, and I still miss mine).  We're always looking for, and are excited by, the next big thing.

Oooooh, new marketing technology....

Additionally, new technology can provide significant cost savings and it's just very, very hard to say "no". The prime example of this is the adoption of social media over the last decade.

Are you sure - are you certain - that your ideal customer base is using, or will be using in the near future, these cool new tools?

Look at the epic fail of QR code adoption in the United States. For a while, they held a lot of promise (I was a huge fan), but the user experience, ultimately, killed it.  Most consumers didn't know what they were, why they should know, and what to do when they ran across them.  They're still out there and used by folks in some limited applications, but they'll never be the big thing we was hoping they'd be back in 2009.

Let's take social media - in 2014, it's universally believed that we must use social media for business, especially for customer service applications, right?  I'd bet that the majority of small businesses within a ten mile radius of me in Dallas-Fort Worth (not known as a technological backwater) aren't on Twitter and will not be in 2014.

Twitter will be eight years old this year, and yet, the dry cleaners and the restaurants and the accountants and the small mom-and-pop retail shops and the lawyers and the doctors and dentists and so on do not tweet, see no value to it, and have no interest in it at all, and they don't think their customers need them to join Twitter to be engaged and connected.

If you serve these sorts of businesses, then you need more tactics than trying to use Twitter as a tool to engage with them.

Chasing new technology while abandoning perfectly good and useful tactics - tactics that customers are actually using and are happy using - is probably not the smartest strategy. Your marketing toolbox should expand, versus making it smaller dropping channels than customers like.

Slow it down while customers catch up with you.

Don't commit the sin of Lust for technology, because you may miss out on connecting with customers where they are and how they need to be, versus the way you want them to be.

Got any stories when the shiny new object distracted you from serving customers?  I'd love to know!