I cringe anytime someone steps up to the microphone to sing the national anthem, especially if the singer is a celebrity. I can predict with near certainty who is going to screw it up completely, and who is going to give a great rendition that will be warmly received by the fans in the stands.
The reason is simple: Most celebrities think the song is about them. They use it to showcase their talents, molding it to their singing style no matter how utterly ridiculous it makes them look. On the other hand, most regular performers – you know, the kind you get at high school or small college games – know that the song is about America. They put the emphasis on the music and usually do a whole lot better than their star counterparts.
We saw this during SuperBowl 45, when Christina Aquilera got so engrossed in her own interpretation that she screwed up the words. She lost the crowd half-way through her mind-numbing version and looked incredibly ill at ease for someone of her stature.
Marketers sometimes make the same mistake. It’s easy to get caught up in our advertising and/or marketing and forget that our messages should focus on the recipient, and not on us as the sender. One of the basic tenets of elementary copywriting is to focus on benefits, not features. Yet I see ads every day that offer little to the prospect other than far too much information about the features of a product or service. Such ads make me want to scream, “Who cares? What’s in it for me?”
Such poorly crafted messages create two problems for you. First, you will lose sales by failing to adequately engage your prospect. People are so time starved that they are unwilling to invest time trying to figure out what the benefits are. If you don’t serve them up in your messaging so that they are easily understood, then your prospect will move on.
Second, you will appear to your prospect to be completely self-absorbed, and that’s no way to build brand loyalty. Remember, everything you do communicates something, and the idea that is communicated may not be what you intended at all. Ignore your prospects’ needs at your own peril.
By the way, errant messaging can show up in ads, on Web sites, in company newsletters, and even in annual reports. It pays to do a marketing audit of all your communications. See if they really are focused on the customer and meeting his or her needs. If not, you’re probably singing a sad song. So go ahead and fix the problem while there is still time. You’ll be singing a new tune in no time.
