9 Great Marketing Quotes You’ve Never Heard Before

Filed in Featured, Small Biz Marketing by Matt McGee on July 8, 2010 4 Comments

Viral marketing. Branding. Marketing in general. Here are nine great quotes about reaching customers that you’ve never heard before.* They come from smart people at Big Ad Agencies, but there’s plenty to chew on even for the smallest of small businesses.

Christian Haas / Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

1.) “Unless you’re Paris Hilton, no video is guaranteed to go viral. A guide for creating a successful viral campaign is as effective as a tutorial on how to win the lottery. OK, you’ll learn the basics like ‘you don’t win if you don’t play,’ but that’s about it. Viral work is, for the most part, unpredictable.”

2.) “One theme [of viral marketing] will likely recur: originality. Originality that draws on popular culture or is so brilliant that it becomes popular culture.”

3.) “Advertisers need to break through not by pushing yet another ad, but by giving people something they actually would want to watch, interact with and share. That often involves approaching advertising differently, taking risks and not doing things that are proven to work. Best practices are, by definition, the antithesis of innovation.”

Lynn Power / ArnoldNYC

4.) “Don’t try to manufacture coolness or try to be hip; consumers can see through that. Just be true to who you are, understand your DNA and make it relevant to people today.”

5.) “It’s essential to have a point of view that puts a stake in the ground and breaks through the clutter.”

Craig Allen & Jason Kreher / Wieden & Kennedy

6.) “If you look at the higest-rated videos on YouTube, they’re not sad dramas, they’re men getting hit with inflatable balls or animals falling off things. Younger generations love humor, which is why advertising is using increasing quantities of it to sell things. People like it. It works.”

Linus Karlsson & Paul Malmstrom / Mother New York

7.) “[Companies] can’t just keep talking and saying the same old things. They need to listen, interact, and be somewhat interesting, just like any person who wants to be taken seriously.”

8.) “Originality and unexpectedness are superpowers. Surprisingly, very few brands use them as such. They’re hard to master and far away from a science or anything you can test. That’s probably why you don’t see more truly original and unexpected communication today.”

9.) “The brain wants to have fun. If you keep thinking about that every day, you’re always going to be interesting and relevant. The brain hates boring and expected.”

– end –

current-issue* You’ve never heard these before, unless you happened to read the current (July 2010) issue of Delta Airlines’ Sky magazine. It had several advertising/marketing-related pieces, including a series of interviews from which I pulled the quotes above. I don’t think I’ve ever read an in-flight magazine as closely as this one. (To read the interviews, click the link above, then click the “Browse” tab on the left and choose Page 60 – “The Mad, Mad World of Advertising.”)

Comments (4)

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  1. Aaron says:

    “Younger generations love humor, which is why advertising is using increasing quantities of it to sell things. People like it. It works.”

    So true.. It’s time that companies start to realize that people do not want to be super serious. Be yourself and have fun!

  2. MiriamEllis says:

    Wow, those really are some good quotes, Matt. Nice find! I like the overall message here that advertisers need to walk away from sell, sell, sell and get ready for a more genuine engagement with the people whose attention they are trying to attract. Very neat.

  3. Hasn’t that always been the case though? What consumer likes commercials that are sell sell sell.

    Those brands that get it right in advertising and media are those willing to take a few gambles, lighten up a bit and approach the audience from a different angle.

    The adverts that people remember (and indeed those that go viral) are those with catchy music/tracks and humerous ones.

    Great find Matt, I hadn’t heard of these quotes before 🙂

  4. Matt says:

    I’ve seen a few B2B companies getting some good results with youtube videos (Hubspot is the best example). I’ve been trying to come up with some ideas for my company. It gets hard when you are in the industrial sector.

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