{"id":2516,"date":"2009-10-22T08:06:57","date_gmt":"2009-10-22T15:06:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/?p=2516"},"modified":"2009-10-22T08:06:57","modified_gmt":"2009-10-22T15:06:57","slug":"marketers-shouldnt-play-with-dead-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/marketers-shouldnt-play-with-dead-things\/","title":{"rendered":"Marketers Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

How about a little pre-Halloween action today?<\/p>\n

You down with that?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Here’s the low down:<\/p>\n

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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

You know of what I speaketh, don’t you?<\/p>\n

Those stinky, rotting animated corpses lurching around in the dark looking to feast on human flesh?<\/p>\n

Well, one zombie movie “theme” is this: <\/p>\n

What’s dead should STAY dead.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And you want to know something?<\/p>\n

Marketing is the EXACT same way.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It was a flop<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I mean, nothing in this campaign worked.<\/p>\n

Nobody wanted the product.<\/p>\n

Nobody was probably even reading the ad.<\/p>\n

And certainly nobody was buying.<\/p>\n

In other words, it was dead as a corpse<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The result?<\/p>\n

I dang near lost my shirt!<\/p>\n

Until finally, I realized my entire campaign was nothing more than a stinky, rotten zombie<\/em> wandering around cyberspace with people running from it and trying to destroy me (its creator) in the process. <\/p>\n

Ugh.<\/p>\n

Anyway, here’s the “Halloween” lesson: <\/p>\n

Marketers should NOT play with dead things.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If it’s dead… it’s dead<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And that, tough guy, WILL scare the hell out of you. <\/p>\n

Ben Settle<\/p>\n

P.S.<\/strong> For lots of ways to “zombie proof” your business, check out:<\/p>\n