Marketing Fails: 3 Types of Marketing Multiple Personality Disorders

When portrayed in the movies and on TV, individuals with multiple personalities aren’t always aware that their alter egos are gaining control of their person and getting them into one form of trouble or another.  They often end up bewildered as to why they’re experience negative results and upsetting people. They don’t understand why some people view them as radically different than they view themselves to be.

When it comes to your marketing, do you have multiple personalities that are sabotaging how customers view your business?  These types of competing marketing audience signals are often the root cause of marketing fails. They could manifest as:

1.  Weak, inconsistent branding across your marketing and communications platforms

To get your brand’s visual and verbal identity aligned across all of your marketing channels, you may first need to determine what you want the “voice” and “look” of your business to be.  Do the work of reviewing and/or writing and creating your:

• mission statement
• vision statement
• tagline
• customer promises
• unique selling proposition (if you’re lucky, you’ll have more than one unique competitive advantage or USP)
• components of visual brand identity (logo, colors, fonts)

Then, let these foundational brand components drive, influence and flavor all of your marketing, across all of your marketing channels. Give customers the same “experience” with your business, whether their interaction occurs online or off, whether they’re reading your ads in print or your email newsletter, blog and social media online.

2. Launching initiatives and programs but failing to follow through

Often times smaller businesses enjoy the advantage of being agile and nimble so that they are able to quickly adapt to changing markets or customer requests. That same advantage can carry a downside if this ability to quickly change course becomes a propensity to do so.  Let your good ideas have time to take root and produce the marketing returns you envisioned.

3. Staff who aren’t bought in to your marketing campaigns, your mission and vision, or your brand as a whole

If your employee orientation or on-boarding program consists of showing staff where the break and bath rooms are and plunging them into on-the-job experiential training, or if you’ve made decisions about your mission, vision, tagline, customer promises and other elements of your business’ brand behind closed doors and then rolled them out to staff, it’s highly likely that one or more of your staff aren’t bought in to your initiatives or your brand — because you’ve never given them the opportunity to understand and do so.

You need to gift all of your employees, from new hires to long-time associates, with training at the time of hire and at least annually to talk about your mission, vision, customer promises and brand as a whole.  You need to tie job responsibilities, expectations, reviews, compensation ad bonuses back to how the role fulfills the mission and vision of your business and how they impact the customer experience.  Every employee should know how their job contributes, and why not just what they do, but how they do it, matters.