Thanks again for the pitch. For the billboard fastball. For the 30-second breaking ball. For that nice banner ad, fluttering just inside my attention zone. Now, it’s time that you knew something. I’m done as your catcher.
For a while, I was enslaved, under contract, and you could pitch whatever you wanted at me. I would wear the mask, put on the glove, mutely make signs; but whatever signals I gave you about what I wanted, you simply ignored. You pitched what you wanted.
There were very few strikes. Mostly balls, wild pitches – lots of screwballs in the dirt. But you didn’t care. Pitch, pitch, pitch. Sell, sell, sell. Your message, one way, pounded from the mound.
What perhaps you haven’t noticed is that now I’m a free agent. I can call signals, and if I don’t like your pitches, you’re not on my team anymore. In fact, I’ve been promoted to General Manager, and if you don’t start listening, you’re fired! Cut from the team.
Oh, yes, you’ve discovered social media all right. But you just think it’s another pitch engine. Grab that ball with a Twitter grip, put a Facebook spin on it, and voila! – we’ve cracked the code.
It’s time to wake up. We’re not “consumers.” We’re not a “demographic.” We’re not objects for your marketing manipulation. And we’re no longer your catchers. Staying on the pitching mound puts you in foul territory these days.
If I like what you have to offer, if you add value, if you listen, I’ll tell you where the strike zone is. Otherwise, get lost. You’ll be cut from the roster and retired soon enough…
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To paraphrase Bull Durham, “hit the showers, Meat, you can’t find the strikezone.”
Well done, Steve. This role-reversal is starting to become really apparent with some web companies that have become big successes without a single sales or marketing person, a single ad, a single “campaign”.
But the clueless marketeer is merely symptomatic of the clueless executive who thinks top-down and sees the customer as an uncooperative, badly behaved adversary to be manipulated. Until management is willing to listen and more importantly RESPOND positively to what customers say and want, the output-only marketeer will continue to exist.
Anyone who’s ever tried to extend a metaphor like that knows how difficult it is to pull off.
But you’ve got yourself a no-hitter there Mr. Woodruff.
One more thing I’d add: You need to make a product or service I actually like.
Without that, all the rest won’t matter.
An entertaining post Steve, I think your baseball anology is very apt for the issue of relevancy in marketing nowadays. Really, it should be more of a game of catch: marketer and consumer communicating and co-operating for mutual benefit, so no one drops the ‘ball’.
As you pointed out, there’s still a place for pitches but it seems to me there are two different scenarios: either get better at identifying your ‘catchers’ (those who will like the sound of your existing pitch – niche) or start working on your repertoire of pitches so you can throw to many. Just be ready for them to throw back!
love it. I have been watching marketers come into whatever’s hot at the moment and totally wreck a good thing.
The bad news is that this type of desperate marketer will never go away.
Great post and apt metaphor, Steve.
What I really hate is when companies or individuals don’t even wait for me to lift my glove, or bother to see whether I’m going to, or whether I even HAVE a glove. Sometimes, they just whip the ball at me anyway, and it smacks me in the head. NOT COOL.
Example: Twitter auto-DMs that offer nothing but “read my blog! subscribe to my feed! check out my newsletter!” SMACK! OUCH.
(WARNING – lame comment pun alert)
Thanks for stepping up to the box and taking some hearty swings, guys! I don’t want to stretch this single post into a double, so I’ll go back to the dugout now and give you some long relief…
I think it obligatory we include a Yogi Berra quote in this thread:
“The future ain’t what it used to be”