Empathy in a World of Marketing Brutes
Or the similarity I see between marketers and dudes on Tinder.
The below slides are taken from a course on Startup Marketing I’ve been teaching at HEC Paris’ Startup Launchpad and HEC’s Digital and Data Majors since 2018.
Here’s my thesis: digital marketers are terminally brilliant at breaking their own toys.
cf Andrew Chen’s Law of Shitty Clickthroughs) — his technical way of putting it is that “channels [decay] over time”. And sure, among the reasons channels decay you’ll find:
- Customers respond to novelty, which inevitably fades
- First-to-market never lasts
- More scale means less qualified customers
But I want to add an overarching reason on top of those:
- Marketers provided with an acquisition channel that works, feel as uninhibited to behave like jerks with their audience as the average bro does to behave like a jerk with his Tinder matches.
You’ll find the detail of what I mean by that in the slides above.
Why do I think this matters?
Two reasons:
- The main response I’m seeing is a race to build more tools that are more targeted, more segmented, more real-time, more programmatic, more automated, more at-scale… To me that’s like saying the key to finding the relationship that will make you happy is to change nothing to the script of that last date where you got slapped across the face but rather to change the time, your jeans, the restaurant and the number of dates.
- I believe marketers are dangerously failing in the face of their societal responsibility. Reading “Stand Out of Our Light” by James Williams, immediately followed by “What is Populism?” by Jan-Werner Müller unequivocally engaged my thinking along that path. The combination of both being brilliantly illustrated by Cambridge Analytica, of course.
Do I think all marketers are jerks?
No.
(Not that I think marketers care much what I think about them either)
What I believe is that the race to more tools and more automation and more targeting has convinced otherwise smart and sensible people that communication is a law of large numbers.
And I get that the quantitative approach is more comforting because I can put my headphones back on, listen to my “Get Pumped” playlist and rattle my brains to push my own technical limits even further with my latest growth hack.
But when you start convincing yourself that all marketing problems have a technical solution, you lose sight of the fact that marketing is simply a scaled attempt at one human talking to another human. If being a jerk doesn’t yield results in a real-world dialogue, why should it online?
