This post is by Michael Pollock, the original owner of Small Business Branding. Yaro Starak now owns and produces the latest content for this blog.
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California Management Review has been thoroughly and properly smacked around (verbally) for an article they published recently. The article, "Stealth Marketing: How to Reach Consumers Surreptitiously," showed up in the Summer 2004 edition, and there’s one Smart Blogging Babe who’s on it like hound dogs on a hamburger.
Jackie Huba, co-author of the Church of the Customer blog and the book, Creating Customer Evangelists, proves, with her scorching indictment of this respected management journal, why she’s this week’s logical choice for Top Ten Smartest Blogging Babes.
In her post, "Exposing stealth marketing," Jackie is anything but stealth when she opens with the line:
"A respected management journal recommends lying and cheating as a marketing tactic."
Ouch. That’s gonna leave a mark on the boys from Berkley’s Haas School of Management, the unfortunate recipients of Jackie’s verbal left hook right outta the shoot. After that sizzler, you’d be hard-pressed to suggest it could get any worse for these unsuspecting academic heavyweights.
But hold on to your Birkenstocks boys, because this is truly one Smart Blogging Babe. And she’s looking for a first round knock-out when she points out, rather deftly, how the article’s suggested tactics are anything but ethical.
"It’s predatorial. It conjures an image of pedophiles luring naive or vulnerable young girls or boys into their cars with the promise of candy, not marketers trying to clearly identify value and build genuine relationships with prospects and customers.
And don’t make the mistake of thinking these brutal verbal blows are merely the accusative platitudes bubbling up from the cynical soul of an overly emotional business blogging babe. Hardly!
Analytically, Jackie moves with the grace of a surgeon when she skillfully contrasts the authors’ "stealth marketing tactics" with "more ethical buzz marketing examples of the same tactic."
Marketing in pop and rap music
* Definition: embedding commercial messages in popular music
* Stealth marketing: Rapper Jay-Z was paid to mention Motorola in his music
* Buzz marketing: Run-DMC’s song "My Adidas." Adidas did not pay for this; the rappers just liked the shoes. (Lesson here: create a remarkable product worth talking, er, rapping about.)
But wait. She’s not done yet. Jackie delivers the final knock-out blow when she concludes:
"No offense to [the article’s authors], but your viewpoint represents everything that’s wrong with marketing today."
If you have an opening on your list of revolutionaries, and even if you don’t, you’d do well to pencil in the name, Jackie Huba, this week’s Top Ten Smartest Blogging Babe.