Forget Love…All You Need is Marketing
Writing by Darrin Dickey on Tuesday, 11 of September , 2007 at 8:35 pm
I never intended for my first post on the BrandingFire blog to be of a political nature. But Seth Godin, whose work and ideas I admire greatly, posted something on his blog today for which I just had to add to the conversation. In this post, Thinking About This War, Seth says that one of the greatest weapons we have in a post-9/11 world is good marketing. I’ve thought for more than 10 years that a good marketing campaign can be as effective (though not always as fast) as a strong army for implementing regime and policy change around the world. But what really got me was where Seth said government frequently prefers enforcement to changing people’s behavior with good marketing.
Take, for instance, my home town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Government and citizens will sometimes get cross-wise from each other. That’s to be expected. But when government continually goes against the public grain, that’s the sign of a problem. Three examples from Murfreesboro are:
- Annexation - The city has been annexing stray areas of county land in order to consolidate the city limits. However, they’ve been doing it against a citizenry that STRONGLY doesn’t want to be annexed. The Planning Commission and City Council have held meeting after meeting to listen to angry county residents who do not want to be annexed. Then, they went ahead and annexed the areas anyway. When persuasion didn’t work fast enough for them, they chose enforcement. Now the city is having to spend precious money to fend off two (so far) lawsuits from angry residents.
- The city has forced one business (a gas station/convenience store) to remove an electronic sign and has tried to force Lamar Outdoor Advertising to remove a digital billboard. The city has an embargo against electronic signs, but in both of these cases, they had approved the signs that were put up. Now, they’re forcing these businesses to foot the bill for removing the signs. Once again, the city chose enforcement over persuasion (and reason). Once again, the city is being sued and has to spend even more precious revenue to fight off a lawsuit.
- Recently, a local car wash was forced by city officials to remove a U.S. flag they were flying. It seems the flag violated the city’s ordinance on how large a flag could be. Apparently, the car was owners were too patriotic. Again, the city chose enforcement. It was only under massive outrage by citizens and a small protest at the car was site that commission members hastily amended the flag ordinance to allow the flag.
In all of these cases, the city has handled the PR on these issues terribly. Instead of helping citizens to understand the issues (or rescind the rules if they were just nonsense), the city has chosen to stubbornly stand their ground and use enforcement instead. And they’re losing in the battle for the public’s hearts and minds. Losing badly. Sometimes, being right isn’t enough. You need to appear to be right. In marketing, perception is frequently truth.
Category: Marketing 101, Public Relations
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