Where Marketers Have Gone Wrong

Marketing is traditionally the voice between a company and the market. Marketing’s role is about connecting, engaging and building relationships. It is about taking product characteristics and turning them into meaningful messages that highlight the value and the benefits of products. It is about using powerful words that inspire, educate, build trust and loyalty, and prompt action.

Marketing is all about effective communication which serves as a means of connection between people. But somewhere along the way marketing has lost its human touch.
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Interactions have stopped being about people but about leads, and relationships became transactional and revenue-driven often hidden behind automated workflows and campaigns with the single objective to turn “leads into wins”. Most marketers at some part of their career are guilty of this.
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To understand why this is occurring we need to consider how organizations, vendors and the marketing industry may be contributing to this. Marketing performance within an organization is frequently measured by the number of leads it brings in and its contribution to the sales pipeline. This is further reinforced by the marketing industry and vendors which evangelize best practices that embrace terminologies such as marketing qualified leads, conversions, and many others. Social media channels have also given marketers and brands a new way of communicating, yet once again, companies miss out on creating a two-way conversation with people which is based on authenticity.

Now we hear a new industry term starting to make a buzz, human-to-human marketing. New white papers will surface, articles will be written, webinars will be held on this topic. It is ironic that marketers, who are the pillars of communication, have to be re-taught to embrace the essence of marketing. Human-to-human communication has always been the core of marketing. We simply need to go back to the basics.