Technology is a wonderful thing. It is now easier than ever for untrained people to produce documents, presentations and websites that display new levels of sophistication, coupled with bad taste.
In the past, when only skilled professionals could produce such items and when the technology was restricted to just a few fonts, basic colours and limited functionality, the business materials produced were restrained, professional and focused on content.
Unfortunately, now even the most professional organisations are producing content that looks like the nightmarish imaginings of a hyper-active toddler who has overdosed on Cola and sweets. My version of MS-Office contains well over 200 fonts – many are indistinguishable from each other unless you are a font nerd – and most of the others should be banned as an affront to good taste.
There is an unlimited palette of colours available to those who prefer to hide the message under a migraine and for those with nothing better to do you can spend hours drawing the perfect arrow.
All this does is produce noise that obscures the content and the message. How many times have we been bored watching a presentation which must have looked fantastic in the isolation of the presenter’s office, but just looks clunky and ill-advised to the audience?
Never has the old adage “less is more” been more valid. Along with my new mantra of “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”, I think these should be etched on the heart of every marketer.
This does not just reply the examples mentioned above, but the dead hand of technology and automation now stretches into all other aspects of marketing communication.
Automation should be a life saver for marketing departments as it can free up valuable bandwidth to improve the messaging to their customers. Unfortunately, this time benefit is being wasted because of the time spent playing with these new tools, getting the reporting correct and finding the best templates and content ideas they can steal.
Instead of delivering the myriad benefits promised by the vendors, the sad reality in all too many cases are that this technology has sucked out the ability for original thought and effective communication has been replaced by “best practice”. If everyone followed best practice all of the time, you could argue that the world would be a different (and not in a good way) place.
Your processes may be automated, but your customers are human.
The last time I looked Sales & Marketing professionals were still human – so why are you letting technology interrupt and weaken the main selling tool – person to person communication?
In the same way that design professionals are still needed to curb the worst excesses of the amateur PowerPoint user, the role of the sales and marketing professional is to stop technology running away with itself and interrupting the sales process.
Spend your time thinking of the best way to talk to customers, not how to make the technology work. Not everything is bad by any means, but blindly following everything just because it is in the tool is not good either. Remember: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!
