Never Build Your Brand On Hope…& What It Has To Do With Slot Machines!

There are more ways than ever before to broadcast our marketing messages and present our brands, but so many companies look to build their castles purely on hope alone.

Take for instance, your Twitter feed. Amongst the stream of consciousness messages that form part of our daily lives, we are also bombarded with dictated messages to interrupt and gain our focus and attention.

This is similar to the old way of marketing where you would spread your message in as many ways as possible, from outdoor advertising to press ads to radio exposure, in the blind hope that people would react and notice it. Simply building awareness, is not the aim, the key is to build conversation, credibility and trust.

By being focused on a target market and with a specific message to that industry, you don’t simply want them to be aware of you, but to be responsive to you. They want to feel that they are being spoken to, directly to them, not at them.

Here’s an analogy that brings this principal to when we were all younger. Remember the 2p slot machines (we still have plenty of them in Bournemouth) and when you put the coin at the top, it could only go two ways. It can hit another coin and trigger a host of others to result in a noise of a return that would always put a smile on your face, or it can sit on it’s own and get lost amongst the crowd of other coins and no smile on your face, just a relentless pursuit of more return for the money spent.

Most marketing efforts are like this, where a message is put out there in the hope that there is an expected reaction to hit as many people as you can. Every single message you create has to be targeted to your audience. People need to feel special that you are talking to them, as opposed to blindly treating everyone and everything as a mass market.

When you try to hit everyone, the impact is small, but if you’re focused and target the right audience, you create value and a guaranteed return on your investment, a bit like those afternoons in the arcade.