What are the most common messaging mistakes I see marketers making today?
Over the course of my career, I’ve seen inexperienced and experienced product marketers (including me) commit a variety of messaging capital “sins”. Here’s my list of the top 3 messaging capital “sins” to avoid:
1. Starting with the WHAT
This is perhaps the most common mistake marketers will make and also the one that will most negatively impact the stickiness of your message. Due to their close relation with product, product marketers will often develop a message around what the product is or what the product can do. This is what I call ‘product/feature-centric messaging’.
This type of messaging tends to be more mechanical and spec-oriented and does not emotionally connect with the intended audience. Studies have shown that when it comes to purchasing and decision making, human beings more often use emotions rather than logic.
This is why you need to start with the WHY. Why should the audience care about your product or brand? Why is your product or brand capable of solving their problems, fulfilling their wants and satisfying their needs? Companies that have a brand or product message that starts with the WHY are often rewarded with higher customer loyalty and can generate up to 5x times more revenue than their direct competitors. This is what is called Solution/Customer-centric messaging.
2. The idea that “one size fits all”
I’ve seen it over and over again, when product marketers assume that everyone will understand their message, even if they have, indeed, started with the WHY. This happens because of one of two reasons.
Reason number 1: “Assuming the market is homogeneous”. This assumption can leave out large sections of the intended target population. Assuming everyone behaves and feels the same will make your message generic and less memorable.
Reason number 2: “Assuming everyone is your audience”. Often, product marketers driven by business objectives want to target the entire market assuming that everyone has a need for the solution they are trying to position.
Regardless of the reason, one way to avoid these mistakes is to carefully develop a marketing research plan. This research should uncover insights about your target audiences, validate or discredit your assumptions and ideally, test your messaging and value propositions. The goal should be to understand that the market is heterogeneous in nature and that you need persona-based messages.
3. Lost in translation
Global product marketers can be biased towards their local market. Often times, given the nature of where they are located or which market is the biggest, product marketers tend to craft messages around specific needs and wants that are not always relatable elsewhere. As I mentioned before, a good narrative is based on clear needs and wants that should have been uncovered through research. Assuming that the needs of one market are the same in another can be a catastrophic mistake.
There are a lot of examples of successful companies that failed in specific markets because of this assumption. For example, one of the reasons Walmart failed in Germany, was because they had a belief that every western country has the same culture as theirs (USA). In America, it’s not uncommon for retail assistants to be chatty and friendly with the customers, and so Walmart decided to train its German employees with the same talk tracks as in America, and this, of course, did not go over well with Germans. The problem with most US-based businesses is that once the message goes international, not enough thought is paid to how the intent will translate – literally or figuratively.
There are several examples of campaigns that, when translated, produced humorous, and in some instances, catastrophic results. One of the most memorable ones is when Coors translated its campaign tagline, "Turn It Loose," into Spanish, where it is a colloquial term for having diarrhea. Here’s a link to the 20 most epic lost in translation marketing mistakes.
