I do not breathe your politics
"Comment is free but facts are sacred." (C.P. Scott)
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Cilit Bang, and evil marketing (2)
OK, so it turns out I have more to say on this. ('No surprises there', you groan.)
A followup comment from friend-of-friend urges caution:
"Should we not wait for the outcome of this investigation before pointing fingers? It does look like there is a distinct possibility that this post could have been created by someone who hates Cillit Bang - for personal or professional reasons. I agree that if it turns out Cillit Bang or one of its agents is behind this then they deserve all the negative Googlebombing they can get, but I'd rather wait and see before jumping to conclusions."Well, your faith in human nature is stronger than mine, and you are right not to want to jump to conclusions. However, the simplest explanation is usually the right one, and you are urging the violation of an important principle, by urging attribution to malice that which could be explained by crassness or stupidity. Think about the possible reasons for posting and the calculated outcomes: The first calculated outcome is: people reading this post will follow the link to the fake cilit bang blog, and see marketing messages, and register an impression of cleverness, or simple product exposure. Advertisers will try anything. They've already admitted they are running a viral campaign based around a blog. How will this work if the 'fake' blogger does not comment on other blogs? Believing this outcome only requires you to believe that the person doing the fake posting has no tact, little regard for feelings, or has spent all day posting similar things and simply slipped up. Simple human failings, in an industry dominated by market-leading, widespread, professional and deliberate crassness (as evinced by the Cilit Bang advert itself). That said, a contemptible failure to draw the line, somewhere, whether it was not picking his blog to comment on, or not embarking on the fake blog campaign itself. The second calculated outcome is from the malicious person angle: people reading this post on, after all, just a blog, will follow the link, see marketing messages, make a generally negative assumption about Cilit Bang marketing, and blog about it or tell their friends. That is, they will virally market that negative image. This requires two further steps than the above. It requires the assumption of malice: a destructive competitor, someone in the company who hates the individual who runs the CB account, or an aggrieved person who believes that nobody will take Reckitt's comprehensive denial seriously. It also assumes that people care enough to be pissed off, and is thus asking for more than outcome one. A marketing person should understand this. The third calculated outcome is the leftfield one. People following the link will see the CB faux blog, and assume it's just a friendly someone who wishes to remain pseudonymous. I can't discount that this happened and the person simply has not made a correction, but I also strongly feel that someone with real sentiments to share, would not attribute them to a fictional guy from an advert and hand over marketing clicks, unless they were certain it would be understood who was behind the pseudonym, or whimsy would be the normal response. As an aside, running a fake blog, and using fake blog postings on others' blogs to get people to read it, is still a contemptible marketing practice on the scale of junk faxing (siphoning, in this case, credibility, rather than printing costs), whether it is done on posts like "look, a bunny with a pancake on his head" or like "the first time I contacted the father who abandoned me." However, as you have surmised, I have a low opinion of manipulative stealth marketing, so, reminded of this by a friend, I will give the last words to the late Bill Hicks, who urged marketing people in his audience to: "Suck a tailpipe. Hang yourself. Borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy. Rid the world of your evil fucking presence. OK, back to the show. You know what bugs me though, is that everyone here who's in marketing is thinking the same thing, 'Oh cool, Bill's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a huge market.'" posted by Michael at 10/01/2005 08:15:00 PM |