Who Knows How To Market A Lousy Product?

It has brought into my attention when I see and hear the offline marketing experts are all talking about creating a story for their lousy products. That’s because they all think that I am lousy at marketing lousy products, which I feel it is true. To them, it is an art to understand how to market a lousy product to become a “good” product. Well, is that really what we want in life? I wouldn’t want to buy a lousy product.

There seems to have a flaw in marketing today. Everybody is trying to “bluff” one another about the quality of their products. Where a certain quality may not exist or is faring badly in the product features, this is an “art” of marketing the product to be more acceptable through the kind of messages they are presenting to the world.

And it turns out that amongst the marketing executives and managers, there seems to have two types of persons:

Firstly, you are good at “lying” to make your lousy product look good.

Secondly, you are good at telling the truth about what is good with this product.

This actually reflects a lot in the person when I see how they market their products. Some marketers are not very motivated when they feel/know that their competitors have a better products than they do. These are the truth tellers in the marketing industry.

For those marketers who are good at “lying”, there seems to have two types of liars.

Firstly, we have the liars who lie through the teeth and may even divulge some benefits which the customers are not going to enjoy anyway. These are the ones who don’t really care about their customers, and they just want to do anything for money in return. I don’t think this kind of marketers are going to last in the Internet. They do work in the offline marketing where they can spend millions of dollars to create an awareness which doesn’t justify their messags. An infamous example comes from Ribena where there are a lot of misleads and false claims from Ribena.

If there is no Internet to assist the consumers to be united to find out more about the companies who lied through their marketing, more and more consumers will just pour money into their pockets and left unsatisfied while the companies may even be trained to deal with all the unsatisfied consumers.

Secondly, we have the liars who know how to tweak with their words and providing disclaimers for thei messages. This is like telling us what they are providing on the front, while having fine prints that they are not providing those quality. This is such a common practice amongst the offline marketers that they are now trying to bring the same techniques into the Internet world.

There is definitely no doubt about the different effectiveness amongst the various kinds of mass media we are dealing with today.

• Internet websites
• TV advertisements
• TV shows sponsorship
• Radio ads
• Radio shows sponsorship
• Newspapers ads
• Even Newspapers articles may be sponsored!
• Sponsored posts in blogs
• Internet advertisements

They can be so effective that they know about the consistent exposure on the mass media which can create some effect to the people around the world. It can cause them to remember the companies. It can cause them to think of them whenever they need solutions. It can even cause them to buy from the companies when the time is riped.

Tweaking the advertisements to make the products look good is definitely an art. The whole idea is not to have any misrepresentation in the products’ benefits to the consumers. With today’s Internet existence, the tweaking skills just got even greater difficulties because of the unite of the consumers in websites such as the Planet Feedback.

Ultimately if the product is really very lousy, sometimes it may be good to move on with an even better product. Products of average performance can be promised with a good customer service and a good marketing strategy. Alas, a product without a good marketing strategy and a good customer service are not going to be very effective…