How about a little pre-Halloween action today?
You down with that?
OK good, because while the following will be a bit (or a lot) strange, it could save you from a ton of frustration and maybe even financial ruin.
Here’s the low down:
As you may (or may not) know, I’m a big monster movie fan. I used to glue myself to the TV watching those old black and white monster shows as a kid. And what freaked me out most were the dang zombies.
You know of what I speaketh, don’t you?
Those stinky, rotting animated corpses lurching around in the dark looking to feast on human flesh?
Well, one zombie movie “theme” is this:
What’s dead should STAY dead.
The idea being, whenever someone tries creating zombies or whatever (i.e. to bring back a dead friend, spouse, pet, etc), the zombies end up destroying he (or she) who brought it back to life.
And you want to know something?
Marketing is the EXACT same way.
For example, a while back I tried my hand at creating a certain kind of product, wrote the ad for it and put it out in the market place.
It was a flop.
I mean, nothing in this campaign worked.
Nobody wanted the product.
Nobody was probably even reading the ad.
And certainly nobody was buying.
In other words, it was dead as a corpse.
And yet, with each failure I became more obsessed with finding ways to “inject” new life into the campaign — like by changing the ad copy and finding new traffic sources.
The result?
I dang near lost my shirt!
Until finally, I realized my entire campaign was nothing more than a stinky, rotten zombie wandering around cyberspace with people running from it and trying to destroy me (its creator) in the process.
Ugh.
Anyway, here’s the “Halloween” lesson:
Marketers should NOT play with dead things.
If it’s dead… it’s dead.
And if you insist on trying to bring it back to life, you’ll only create your very own marketing zombie that feasts on your time, money and energy.
And that, tough guy, WILL scare the hell out of you.
Ben Settle
P.S. For lots of ways to “zombie proof” your business, check out:
