Could ChatGPT have rescued Jaguar from their recent embarrassing catastrophe?

Many recent marketing efforts haven't gone very well. Bud Light comes to mind.

Gerber, Pinto, and other brands have had big fails when they didn't take regional customs or language issues into account.

Can ChatGPT solve this problem?

The temptation to marketing apostasy started when I heard Mark Stiving talk about features vs. benefits.

It’s relatively standard these days to focus on benefits in marketing copy — almost to the exclusion of everything else. What does the product do for the customer? How does it make their life better?

Mark said benefits copy is for people who are new to the product concept while features copy is for people who are familiar with it. For example, when grandpa doesn’t have a smartphone, you focus on the benefits. “You can keep up with the family.” But when he’s used one for a while, you focus on features. “It has a great camera and 256 GB of storage.”

That makes a lot of sense. It’s not one size fits all. Also, it hearkens back to my early days in publishing when people said “features and benefits!”

Then I heard Bob Hoffman talk about the role of fame in selling a product. Bob frequently pokes holes in sacred cows, and he says much of the “received wisdom” in marketing and advertising is nonsense.

I gradually started to question the “marketing wisdom” everyone parrots, and when I saw posts criticizing ads for not emphasizing benefits, not having an offer, or a call to action, I thought, “do we really know that? Are we actually sure that every ad needs those things?”

Sometimes you’ll hear marketers talk about the need for excitement, but I wondered …. If you’re in the library, and somebody comes in and makes a lot of noise, everyone will pay attention. Does that mean that making a lot of noise is a good strategy?

Might audiences be fatigued from hype and attention-seeking antics? Could the diminishing effectiveness of online ads be (at least in part) because we’ve all swallowed the “benefits / call to action / urgency” Kool-Aid?

I’m not a complete heretic. There are some valuable insights in the regular marketing wisdom we hear all the time. But I think we need to keep it in perspective. When you look up the most successful marketing and advertising campaigns, do they follow the oft-parroted guidelines?

Apple’s “Think Different” campaign did have a “call to action,” but the call to action wasn’t to buy their product.

Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign called people to push themselves, but there’s no reason they had to push themselves in Nike apparel.

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign made people look around for cans of coke that had their name, or a friend’s name. What did that have to do with the product?

These ads connected with people on a deep level. They painted an image of something desirable. They associated the brand with an identity. But I don’t think they would pass muster with the marketing orthodoxy I hear all the time.

What if, for example, there are stages to marketing? My brother likes to make an analogy to plowing, sowing, and reaping. Different efforts serve different purposes. Sometimes you’re breaking up the hard ground so the message has a chance. Sometimes you’re planting a seed. Other times you’re getting the sale and collecting the money.

Is the plowman failing if he doesn’t sow? Should we mock the sower because he doesn’t reap? Does every campaign to every market have to do all the work?

Watch out, world! My superpowers are starting to emerge!

Last week I was on a camping trip with some friends, listening to the Ravens game on the radio. I had this premonition that the next play would be an interception. I called it, and I was right.

The same thing happened yesterday with the Redskins game (I won’t call them the Commanders). Also, my wife asked what kind of cake I wanted for my birthday. I said cheesecake, and a couple hours later her boss and his wife showed up at our front door with a cheesecake — as a Thanksgiving gift.

Amazing, right? I’m not only a prophet, but I can manifest cheesecakes at will.

You don’t believe that any more than I do, I hope. The world is full of weird coincidences that have more to do with where we focus our attention than anything magical.

The truth is that we’re plagued with magical, irrational thoughts, which are more politely called “cognitive biases.” Apparently they serve as useful shortcuts that work most of the time, but they can also mislead. It’s important to know them so you can recognize when they creep up — in your own mind, in conversations, in advertising, in sales pitches, etc.

I take my close brush with mastery of the occult over the last week as a sign that I should mention them again. (Kidding, of course.)

I have a deck of cards that explains 24 logical fallacies and 24 cognitive biases. They’re a great way to refresh your recollection of how to think properly, which is an important skill, especially as we seem to have normalized the idea that it’s okay for politicians and advertisers to lie to us.

Some of the biases explained in these cards include …

• Anchoring
• The dunning-Kruger effect
• Optimism and pessimism bias, and
• The availability heuristic

Among the logical fallacies are …

• Begging the question
• The genetic fallacy
• No true Scotsman, and
• The bandwagon effect

It’s important to understand both logical fallacies and cognitive biases, so you don’t get fooled by them, on the one hand, but also so that you don’t mislead people by using them.

The same company also has a deck of 52 brainstorming tools. These can be quite fun. They help you think along different paths and allow creative ideas to bubble up.