Why marketing sucks so bad right now
Michael Girdley argues that older-generation CEOs still produce polished, corporate marketing that younger audiences now distrust. Raw, personal content from company leaders gets massive engagement while glossy corporate posts flop. The fix: CEOs sharing unfiltered stories and opinions instead of hiding behind brand polish.
Chapters
So this remains the biggest mistake I see small business CEOs and companies doing with their marketing. And that is that they are stuck in 2008. So let's tell the story a little bit about how we got here. So most of the folks that are running businesses these days are either older millennials, uh, or they are Gen X, uh, with a few boomers sprinkled in. So that means the people that are running these companies, whether they're small business contractors or the kind of stuff I'm involved in, or small software companies, or any of that kind of stuff, we're people that grew up in an older time. And let's say we're in our 40s, our 50s, our 60s, right? And so our perspective on how the world works and how people communicate very much emanates from how we grew up. And if you take my generation, for example, I'm 49, so yeah, straight up Gen X, represent. Like we grew up in a time when the newspaper still mattered. When people trusted what they saw on TV. There was no such thing as dial-up internet, even much less mobile phones that you can record an entire video of your thoughts while you're walking in a drainage ditch. Yay me. Like, that's just a different planet. And so when folks like me grew up, right, they experienced all that and they ended up with biases that continue on today, which is like, we're pretty predisposed to trust marketing. We know what it is. We're pretty predisposed to trust the things we read in the news. We are comfortable having messages curated for us and manufactured. I mean, heck, I grew up on Saturday morning cartoons. Like, it's been beaten into my head ever since I was a tiny child. So for the longest time, you know, up into the 2000s and then 2008 and even, even up to close to these days, folks like myself who were the consumers driving things, like, we were okay getting curated and customized you know, commercials and everything's glossy and everything's pretty, uh, and, and doesn't feel real. Or it, we were okay with it not feeling real, right? You get the idea. So given we're a bunch of people running these companies who are okay with curated and polished messages, uh, basically like, how do you think we go about trying to market our businesses? Well, we market them exactly the way it would historically work for us. Right? And so you look fast forward to today, how people like me are going about and marketing our business. We are still running the same BS plays that that worked in 2005. And the reality is, the world is changing. And if you think about what's changed in the world, technology and social media has caused a lot of change, right? And one of those is that we've suddenly seen different viewpoints on all types of stuff. People have started to question what these polished messages look like. And also, they are bombarded with things that have just turned out to not be true, that you can't trust. And think about it. How many emails do you get that you just can't trust? Well, most of them. How many marketing messages do you get that you just can't trust? How many messages do you read on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all these different places that is just total BS in the end, and it's not trustworthy. Well, if you get bombarded with that kind of stuff for enough time, it changes how you think as a society. And it can even change even more the younger people because that kind of BS is the only communication they've ever known. So if you're bombarded in your whole youth by things that you just don't trust, How do you respond to that? And therefore, how does that change how somebody would market to you? Well, the reality is, if you go talk to young people today, they have no interest in polished stuff. Basically, a curated commercial comes on or a wildly put-together video where every single aspect of stuff is put together perfectly, they see right through that. And they know, "Oh, that's the type of stuff I know I don't trust." or I don't have enough signal at this point to know I can trust it. And that brings us to where we are today, which is suddenly consumers are looking for signals that they can actually trust what you're telling them, right? They're looking for signs like, how do I know that I can believe in this thing? How do I know that this is real? How do I know this is a person I can trust? And that's where the impetus is on us, the marketing people who are trying to sell things for our business and generate awareness. We have to figure out how to do that. So what's the answer? Well, The answer is actually kind of crazy. You actually get a privilege as a business person now. You get to spend less on putting together highly crafted and directly kind of glossy marketing messages. In fact, a lot of what you get to put out, it looks just like this video, which is me with a hat on walking in a drainage ditch. And you see what's going on here. Like I'm talking about my opinions, I'm talking about my story, I'm talking about my feelings on something and giving you my perspective. And that kind of marketing message, which I'm marketing you, right? I'm trying to tell you a story, convince you of something, turns out to be the types of things that are going to work these days in a world where people don't trust the glossy. And so fast forward to today, you see companies still putting out the tired corporate marketing speak, the same things that are tweets written about press releases, that are the same glossy promo videos with stock, you know, with stock music. And you know what? Nobody cares. Nobody watches that stuff. Nobody pays attention to it. And the reason is, is because it doesn't feel real. We're not speaking to the consumers as to what they actually want. And look, you can see this in the numbers, right? If you go look at a major corporation putting out all this glossy stuff, or even a small business putting out all this glossy stuff, you know, on a Twitter or an Instagram, they may have 5 followers or 5 likes on a given thing. And then you go look at what the CEO, is publishing natively, where the CEO is talking about their story and being real in tweets and being a real person and sending out all those signals that show, hey, like, I'm a trustworthy person and you should do business with me and here are my values and all that kind of stuff, right? And then you look at that same account on Instagram or Twitter and it'll have 100,000 followers. Well, that's the message for us as business owners. What the market is telling you is it wants you to go and produce this kind of raw content, real content, stuff where people can learn who you really are, what your company is about, and understand your story. And see those kinds of signals in order to want to do business with you. They don't want to read all that glossy stuff. They don't want to read something that a 22-year-old marketing intern put out. They want to understand what the leaders of the company are thinking and how the company is doing the stuff that's going to align with what the customers want. And here's the last point on this. Like, the problem is not the marketing people. The problem is not the marketing firms. Like, they get this, they see the numbers, they see the pattern. The problem is the business owners. We're the ones that are coming in and saying, hey, do things the way I've always wanted to do them. We're the ones scared to be our real selves online, scared to be our real, real people in front of our customers and express our values and opinions and reach the customers where they are. It's not the marketing people that are having the problems. It's the actual owners and CEOs of the businesses. And so the good news is, if you're one of the few businesses that like figures this out, the few CEOs that figures this out and has the courage to do it, like you can have a huge advantage. Because I'll say one thing about Gen X, my generation, and the baby boomers, we're a stubborn-ass group of people. It takes a lot to change our mind, uh, and that's okay because that could give you a huge competitive advantage if you get your mind right as a business owner and learn how to do stuff to meet the customers where they are today. And then, man, go buy some stuff.
