Ark of the Lost Angels

If someone said this was what modern office work looked like, that would be false advertising. _{(Credit: Times Union)}

Marketing is a delicate balancing act between presenting a product’s best aspects in the best way possible, and honestly demonstrating its usefulness and desirability.

How do you know if you want to buy something if you don’t know about it? Marketing enjoys a crucial role in an open market. Everybody stands to make money by making a product, but the two factors that determine how well something does are:

1. How good is that product compared to its competitors?
2. Do people know about it?

The job of a marketing department, therefore, is to make sure people know about the product it’s supporting. Often times, that is accomplished with a bit of creative framing, and some spin. Everyone has been ‘misled’ by marketing in some way or another. Perhaps an appliance that never delivered, or a video game that failed to live up to the hype. Maybe the opposite occurs, and the marketing makes something look bad which is actually of high quality.

Why does it happen? Why is it so important to understand? What goes wrong?

What Goes Wrong

When the initial teaser trailer for Marvel’s 2015 team-up movie, Avengers: Age of Ultron premiered, it promised a dark story about the eponymous villain’s sinister takeover of the world, and slow destruction of the Avengers, ushering in the world’s next level of ‘evolution.’ The movie that released was much more lighthearted in tone, famously demonstrating director Joss Whedon’s tendency for characters to be overly quippy and resulted in a Marvel movie that fell more in line with tamer entries into the franchise, while still being a fun, bombastic superhero movie. It would seem that the marketing lied to the consumers.

Or did it?

There are a multitude of reasons why the trailers could look so different than the final product. Namely, in many cases, outside marketing agencies are brought in with less knowledge of the film production, plot, and tone than the filmmakers have. Or, at the very least, the marketing team is wholly separate from the production team. This results in many movie trailers cherry picking the coolest, most visually distinctive, or most memorable scenes, lines, or moments, with little regard to the plot or characters. The marketing team/agency’s job is to take the material they have access to and create a trailer for the movie that gets people interested in it, talking about it, speculating about it, and excited to go see it. They don’t have a responsibility towards artistic integrity because they are not entirely artists. Their job is to get people into theaters to see that movie. The disappointment comes once audiences are in the theater and watching something other than what they were promised, or what they believed the movie to be based on their own preconceptions.

That touches upon the next point, and this isn’t wholly the burden of the marketing department. People have a tendency to take what little they are given and run with it. One of the tricks of good storytelling is to talk about something so wonderful or horrendous in the abstract, to not give too many details or show that much. People are creative thinkers by nature, and often anything that isn’t given too much detail in a purposeful way leads the audience to fill in the blanks with their own imagination. In a movie, that can be a great thing: it will lead audience speculation to build conversations for years to come, and the movie is recommended by word of mouth to people intrigued by the conversations but need the full context to take part in the discussion. Trailers can have the same effect, but if the end product does not resemble what people believe, or are led to believe, it can result in backlash. That means movie studios whose reputations are stung, directors who no longer bring a guaranteed audience with them, or genres which fade from being the hot thing at the moment. It’s the exact opposite of what good marketing is supposed to do: sell the current product well and set good expectations for the next product to be released. Fulfilling promises well is good marketing in and of itself, no trailers required.

This isn’t unique to cinema.

Take, for example, a software company building a secure document transit system. The idea of this company is to build a platform to securely transfer digital information without having to rely on outdated hand delivery or fax machines but is more secure than email. A dedicated fax solution costs X dollars per year, but a digital system which follows the same requirements for secured transit to permit it to transfer healthcare data while remaining federally compliant costs a third of that. However, the new digital solution is not compliant with federal regulations on classified information above a certain level. Who should the company market to?

The best potential users to hit first are hospitals looking to upgrade from clunky fax machines or expensive cloud-solutions using fax infrastructure, seeing as the product offers exactly what they’re looking for. This would be primarily a business-to-business (B2B) offering. The average consumer watching those movie trailers isn’t going to need a secure document delivery system, even though their bank might want to use it to get secure information from their members, so the average person having some recognition of the product and company isn’t wholly without merit, but the prize is the businesses in the healthcare industry looking to upgrade while cutting their overhead and remaining connected. Sure, it might take less to upkeep that old fax machine, but what happens when nobody else has a fax machine capable of receiving the information? More than that, wouldn’t a digital solution allow for better data entry into the modern standard of digital systems?

When deciding how to tackle this problem, the marketing department has to answer these questions in order to decide on their approach. Their target audience needs to be decided upon early. What clients could not make use of this product? Large defense contractors with entire departments working on classified materials, like stealth aircraft or hypersonic missiles can’t make use of it, so it’s pointless to target them. Those healthcare customers mentioned earlier? That’s going to be the bread and butter, at least for the product that’s being offered currently. Maybe down the line, those defense contractors might be convinced to switch to the solution on the wholesale if the encryption and security protocols are brought up to compliance with confidentiality standards, but that’s the job of the development team. The marketing team’s job is to make the product sound appealing to its target demographic without over-promising beyond its capabilities.

Or worse yet, lying outright.

When Marketing is Blatant Lies

2020’s most-anticipated video game launch, Cyberpunk 2077, launched in a disastrous state. The difference here compared to other sources is that there was a calculated campaign on the part of the developers, CD Projekt Red, to obscure as many of the game’s shortcomings as possible. They refused to give review keys for copies of the game on consoles, only Microsoft Windows PC copies were reviewed. The game was optimized most for PC, and it resulted in glowing reviews before the game launched. At the time the games launched, the Microsoft Xbox Series X|S and the Sony PlayStation 5 had just been released, with significantly higher capabilities than the Xbox One and its derivatives, and the PlayStation 4. The problem was, most users still had Xbox Ones and PS4s, because the new consoles were just not available. There’s a whole article which could be written about Microsoft and Sony not planning ahead for the largest console launch since the previous generation, and the market advantage of getting the new console into consumers’ hands during an unprecedented global pandemic. However, for the sake of brevity, the Xbox One and PS4 were the two consoles most console gamers had when Cyberpunk 2077 launched, and reviewers were unable to accurately tell consumers how those games would play on those platforms.

Additionally, CD Projekt Red hyped up features in the game for years before release only to quietly stop mentioning them in the months before release day itself, which was also delayed multiple times, after the company backtracked on its promise not force its employees into crunch to hit the release target.

In essence, Cyberpunk 2077’s marketing hyped the game as the great paradigm shifter with all these fantastic features never seen together in an RPG game which would forever set the standard for new video games. What launched was a buggy mess of an action game with RPG elements that was carried by the depths of its world and intriguing storytelling.

In an ironic twist of fate, Cyberpunk 2077 is now lauded as becoming the game it could have been at the start of its lifecycle in consumer hands. The developers worked hard to build the game on a technical level that it should have been at launch and take advantage of the stellar world.

Word to the wise: for any successful turnaround story such as this, there are thousands more products that never get the shot for a redemption arc, and not every failure of development can be made up for with promises of fixing things after the fact. Often times, such catastrophic failures and blatant falsehoods in marketing are seen as unforgivable and the company is liable to take a severe financial beating. CD Projekt Red traded off its previously stellar reputation and put in the work to fix Cyberpunk 2077. Without such a solid history, the company would have more than likely been sold for parts by now.

There’s a thin line to walk between being honest and being appealing, and that’s the job of effective marketing.

The Importance of Being Honest…While Still Being Appealing

First and foremost, entertainment products are not the same as business enterprise products. A movie does not have an impact on whether or not a company can move documents securely, as in the above example. However, the same principles of knowing what one is selling applies in all circumstances.

The best way for a marketing team to be effective and efficient in getting the word out about a product is knowing the product. Too much compartmentalization runs the risk of keeping accurate information away from the people who need to get that information across. The more the marketing team knows about the product, the better job they can do in selling it.

Without understanding the desired audience for a product, any marketing effort for that product is doomed to fail. Some potential customers will need certain features of a product while other customers will need different features. Tailoring the content of marketing materials to the delivery mechanism and the intended audience makes a product more impactful.

It is also important to recognize the drawbacks of a particular product while not highlighting them. Instead of a company talking about the limitations, talking about what it can do outside of its competition will help make the product seem more inviting. It’s still important to be honest with statistics and performance benchmarks. The goal is never to outright deceive someone, simply to convince them that the product being offered is the one which will best suit their needs.

Marketing for business solutions is slightly different than marketing for entertainment products, but with every release, the product’s response compared to the marketing preceding it will affect the company’s reputation. If a product delivers or exceeds the expectations marketing set, then the company’s reputation will become much more favorable. Disappointing results will result in less trust in a company’s quality. However, outright falsehoods in marketing will devastate public trust in a company. If basic features do not work as advertised, or the end result bears no resemblance to what was promised in marketing materials, it can be fatal for a company. People are willing to overlook some things that weren’t quite as amazing as they could have been, but utter lies are often the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and for good reason. Thus, marketing is also about managing expectations. Nobody will care if the next iteration of Windows has a large number of quality of life changes that weren’t talked about in the lead up. They will care if the marketing collateral promises Windows cures cancer, and no cure is found by the end of release day.

The Room Where It Happens

At the end of the day, solid communication is the most crucial part of marketing. If the marketing team doesn’t understand what they’re supposed to be advertising, then they won’t be able to advertise effectively. The best way to keep marketing involved effectively in the outcome of a product is to keep them in the know throughout the entire process.

Marketing teams are at their best when they are knowledgeable about the development work. A marketing department cannot accurately advertise a movie while preserving the narrative twists if they only know a fraction of information about the movie. In the same way, a software company whose marketing department relies on partial information and hopeful goals rather than the realistic expected outcomes and ongoing work of a development team is unable to appropriately manage expectations and may end up advertising features that aren’t even in the final product. This runs the risk of alienating customers, hurting the company’s reputation, and making it much harder to break even on the next product launch, which only puts the rest of the company further into risk.

If a marketing team doesn’t understand the other aspects of what a company is building, then the risk for the marketing team to misrepresent those efforts grows. With that risk growing, the risk of other problems arising also grows, until it puts the whole company at risk. By the same token, a company could offer the best product in the world, and if nobody knows about it, the company won’t be around to offer a new iteration.

Marketing is a public trust between company and consumer. It’s important to use ethical decision making and logical thinking to most accurately portray a company’s offerings while still ensuring that those offerings are more attractive to potential customers than the competitors’ products. It isn’t an easy job, but a successful campaign can help build off the success of a solid product and propel any business to greater heights.