Hey… Who Are you marketing to?

I read the latest Seth Godin blog post with great interest, and the reason was that I am often a little unsure of the message I want to give potential customers, and know that you should never ever promise something that you cant deliver on, and I have in the past… and its caused me sleepless nights.

There are some real advantages to getting older, and one is knowing you cant please everyone, you need to select clients that value the service you provide and not pander to the masses. In his blog post Seth discusses the idea that we often market to the regulators and not our customers… a powerful and very true message.

So according to Seth…

“If you think that’s what we want, why don’t you give it to us?

The sign in front of the breakfast bar at the hotel says, “from garden to table.”

Really? Virtually every item I see has been processed four times, steamed, stored and steamed again.

Marketing pitches are finely tuned to resonate with the audience in mind. Too often, though, the marketer is only in charge of the pitch, and someone else in the organization has to make the thing.

So the marketer brags about how tasty the food on the airplane is, or how reliable the cell phone service is or how magically transporting the aromatherapy of the soap is–and then someone else, someone under different pressures and constraints–has to deliver. And they rarely do.

They rarely do because the paying customer isn’t their customer. Their customer is the quality control department, the accounting department and the “don’t-rock-the-boat” department.

Marketers need to spend less time making promises and more time keeping them.”

Have you found yourself doing this, or do you have examples of this?