Tammivaara Digital Marketing

This might seem like an insanely broad question, but I can’t think of a topic I’m more passionate about professionally.

Let me give you a small example to start with:

In my free time, I like to play a certain strategy game, let’s call it ‘The Game’ for the sake of this writing. In my opinion, strategy games are a great way to relax and at the same time develop problem-solving skills.

I’ve deliberately disabled all notifications from The Game to avoid constant spam dictating what I should be doing. Instead, I prefer to play at times that I choose.

This morning, as I checked my email, I found a newsletter from The Game. The marketing team had chosen the subject line to the e-mail: ‘Your shield is expiring soon.’ Given that the shield is a crucial element in the game, I’m always vigilant to ensure it never expires.

So, I was puzzled and, of course, went straight into the game to check the situation, and lo and behold, there was still just over 14 hours of the shield left, just as I had calculated.

Upon opening the newsletter, I was greeted by the headline ‘Your shield expires today.’ Although it may seem trivial, this detail annoyed me significantly. Given that the shield’s duration is typically 8 or 24 hours, stating it expires ‘today’ (or tomorrow) is, of course, obvious and redundant.

The subject line mimicked the format of the in-game notification that alerts players when the shield is truly on the brink of expiring, typically within an hour.

This felt, unfortunately, like a cheap attempt to get the player to log into the game and, in my opinion, it was a glaring example of flawed and customer-demeaning marketing, which such a large company should have left behind long ago.

It didn’t bring any kind of information or added value to the customer and made the company look almost desperate, which it really shouldn’t be, considering it’s a billion-dollar business.

Furthermore, it left me feeling cheated as a customer, a sentiment that any marketer who truly values their audience should strive to avoid at all costs. This incident promptly led me to unsubscribe from their mailing list.

This experience led me to reflect on the core principles of effective and good marketing, which I believe are:

• You always want to think from the customer’s perspective. Does my message give them any value? How will they feel when receiving your message? Good marketing gives the receiver something they can actually use and think about.
• Respect your customer and audience. They are not idiots.
• Be truthful. If your product or service is lacking something or is flawed, invest in fixing it rather than crafting dishonest marketing messages.
• Generate positive emotions. I know that in some old marketing books they probably say that FOMO etc are great emotions to exploit, please don’t do it. Your brands image will be eventually compromised. Instead, generate excitement, enthusiasm and trust. You want these emotions to be linked with your brand rather than fear.
• Look beyond the immediate sale and focus on how to sustain and grow the customer relationship over time. Manipulation won’t pay off in the long run.
• Feedback is gold. Respect customer input and continuosly improve based on it.
• Use data analytics to tailor marketing messages to individual customer preferences. This shows that you actually make effort to provide the customers what they need.
• Review your marketing materials before sending them out and ask yourself that does it build trust and credibility.

So in the end, good marketing consists of the same core elements that any meaningful human intercation should have: respect, trust and empathy. Manipulating customers and looking for quick pay-offs is never the way to go.

What do you think are the basis for good marketing? What kind of strategies should be avoided at all costs?