Balance Is Key

My birthday is October 16, therefore making my astrology sign a Libra. I don’t know if I like balance because of that fact, or because that’s just the type of person I am. Regardless, I strive to have balance in all aspects of my life. Due to this characteristic, I had a hard time reading Chapter 6 of The Face-to-Face Book. If you could look at the chapter, you’d see blue highlighter throughout every page. Not just highlighting lines, no, I wrote comments upon comments in the margins with my highlighter. Thank goodness I bought the book because if someone had to read from my book they’d probably get annoyed with all of my observations.

Anyways, Ed Keller and Brad Fay write the chapter…well the whole book in my opinion, with one-sided glasses. They do not take into consideration both sides of every story.

For example, Keller and Fay speak about social media gurus in a bad light. They appear to believe these people only think social media is the way to go for advertising. I don’t know why they believe this, but I’m a senior in college and know that is not the case. Social media has to be accompanied with all other forms of marketing in order to create a well-known brand. Keller and Fay spoke about the CEO of Zappos by saying, “It is powerful stuff when the top marketer for what’s known as a social media-made brand states that social media alone cannon deliver on the company’s business goals," (p. 162). DUH! Do they honestly think those who support the use of social media believe it’s the only way to go? I sure hope not but I have the feeling this is the case.

 

You MUST have a balanced approach to marketing/communication strategies. Compare it to your sleeping, eating and working schedules. You cannot live a healthy life if you do not have a decent balance of each. Yes, some people have more work than sleep in their schedules and others have more sleep than work. Not every one person has the same balance in their life. After some time, they learn what is best for their lifestyle. This is the same way marketing strategy should be thought about within a company. Each company is different and therefore their balance is going to be different than others. What makes a successful business is knowing exactly what balance works and what does not.

Speaking of balance, I’d like to point out the lack of balance in case studies shown by Keller and Fay. The only real case study they continue to refer to (when speaking so negatively about social media) is that of Apple. Yes, we understand Apple is a phenomenal company with extremely loyal customers. You don’t have to tell us this every chapter and for every example. Only using this case study weakens their view on advertising and marketing.

Keller and Fay talk about how Apple has not benefited from social media. Well, their fan base was already huge prior to the launch of social media. However, they do still utilize social media to reach customers.

Switching gears, the authors give credit to a few companies that have used social media the “right way,” one being Old Spice. They start the section by saying this, “Over the past couple years, the case study of choice for the social marketing community has come from Old Spice..” (p. 156). The “case study of choice?” They make underlying comments towards social media that, even while complimenting the practice, that bash it at the same time. Obviously their “case study of choice” is Apple considering that’s the company they ever talk about.

Keller and Fay think one-sided and again this is proven on page 151. In this section they were talking about the most popular reason people access brands’ social media accounts. “You have to go way down the list, to the tenth spot, to find anything about brands, with a quarter of consumers (23 percent) saying they use social media so they can interact with brands.” Can you tell me how many people watch TV just to “interact” or learn about brands? How about radio? I have to venture to assume people aren’t glued to their TVs just to watch commercials. So, you’d have to go “way down the list” to find that people watch TV for the advertisements.

I could go on and on about the imbalance of this chapter and book in general. However, I will spare you all reading even more on this blog post. Trust me, next week I will make sure to have another enlightening post about The Face-to-Face Book.

Until next time, stay classy my fellow bloggers.

Candace