Enthusiasm: The Enemy Of Good Marketing

Mark RitsonDecember 8, 20154 min

There is no doubt about it enthusiasm is the enemy of good marketing. I’ve seen it too many times. The product manager is so in love with his new device he cannot see its functional flaws. The account manager is so in love with her agency’s “big idea” she does not realize that it fails to meet any part of the client’s brief. Or the digital strategist is so enraptured with social media that he cannot countenance a world in which archaic tools like radio or outdoor have any place. No doubt about it – enthusiasm is a bad thing in marketing.

Ergo, cynicism and critical thinking are good traits. Show me a decent brand manager and I will show you a deeply paranoid, skeptical human being. The best marketers treat all marketing channels with equal disdain, all competitors as possibly deadly rivals and every aspect of their product or service as being potentially flawed. Steve Jobs spent most of his time undulating between misery and anger, rarely experiencing joy of any kind. That was because he was a marketer.

And yet even marketers of the most miserable countenance are occasionally vulnerable. It is possible, ever so rarely, to prick their thick hide of indifference and sway them with emotion. It happened to me last week, for example. I opened the paper to discover that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla had announced the arrival of a daughter – Max. To celebrate the birth, the Zuckerbergs announced that they were going to donate 99% of their Facebook shares, worth approximately $45 billion, to a foundation set up in their name.

Zuckerbergs Welcome New Baby and a Charitable Idea

I read the article. I studied the letter that the new parents had written to their new baby daughter. And I looked for the longest time at the photo of the pair holding their new child, especially the bewitched, utterly disarming look on Mark Zuckerberg’s face. And then, dear reader, I must confess that I wept.

I bumped back into reality pretty quickly afterwards as I surveyed the response to the Zuckerberg decision in the media. No good deed, it would seem, goes un-critiqued in today’s cynical world. For many commentators the move was “questionable” because rather than a donation the shares would be used to set up a limited liability company (LLC) – one which could go on to invest money and generate profits. Zuckerberg countered that any profits would be reinvested in the LLC and therefore all support good deeds. Other critics suggested the new LLC was a blatant attempt to avoid taxes. Zuckerberg pointed out that his new LLC would pay tax and afford neither he nor his wife any tax advantages. Beaten to that punch others bemoaned the fact that Zuckerberg was setting up his own private not-for-profit to help the world, rather than having paid higher taxes on Facebook’s profits in the first place. Still others, bereft of anything other than hatred for billionaires who aren’t shits, queried why Zuckerberg had the right to spend his money on his projects to help others without consulting the rest of society.

The Guardian was the worst of the lot. “Although the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative isn’t a foundation and will pay taxes,” the paper conceded, “nothing about their project changes the fundamental contradiction of mega philanthropy: the wealthy have the power to impose their personal visions of the common good on everyone else while calling it charity”.

Sorry? I fail to see the issue here. He earned it and he wants to invest it in helping people. Isn’t he allowed to dictate where his money goes?

The problem, of course, for some is that when billionaire capitalists like Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet work overtime to earn a fortune and then work even harder to give it all away to help their fellow man it totally derails all the anti-capitalist rhetoric. These megalomaniacs selfishly trampled over others to get their ill-gotten riches that they now blow on property and ridiculous yachts. Some of them might still do that, but an annoying number of the really famous, extremely rich ones are devoting themselves and almost all of their worldly possessions to helping others. Back in 2000 most people gave Bill Gates an enormous amount of grief for setting up his foundation. Fifteen years and $35 Billion later, I defy you to find a more inspiring, wonderful or humble human being walking this earth. I’m serious.

I think Facebook is an oversold, fundamentally doomed operation. But, that aside, what Mark and Priscilla did last week was amazing. It’s good to be cynical but,  it’s Christmas. Mark Zuckerberg just gave us a beautiful nativity scene and an astonishing gesture of benevolence and generosity.

This thought piece is featured courtesy of Marketing Week, the United Kingdom’s leading marketing publication.

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Mark Ritson

One comment

  • Doug Garnett

    December 14, 2015 at 1:09 pm

    I don’t agree. Enthusiasm and hunger is necessary to take the risks that have the big payout. What this article seems to discuss is “unbridled enthusiasm”.

    I’ve always recommended marketers copy the enthusiasm of a lawyer for his case… A good lawyer can always argue the other side of the case and know his strengths and weaknesses. Just so, good marketers can always articulate the critical reasons something might fail and discuss them with objectivity.

    Sad that this seems to be all about the emotional extremes – and not about clear eyed objectivity.

    As to the Zuckerburgs… I think what they are doing in horrible. Education in the US is already suffering from billionaire imposed destruction. And the Z’s are proposing more of the same in education. Imposing his vision on public services without popular vote in ways that destroys them despite popular will.

    if they were restricting their work to hunger, illnesses, etc. perhaps the damage would be less. But he is specifically planning to fund his vision of education driven by tech (a vision that it’s quite clear is a phantom). Thankfully, my children are just about out of schools…

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