The Clean and Green Club

Yeah, the big words in the headline are on purpose…and very relevant. Cognoscenti are those in the know, the experts, connoisseurs (same route word, I believe—but French origin, rather than Italian). the secret society,if you will. What Edward Bulwer-Lytton called “the great unwashed.”

Hoi polloi are the rest of us, the masses.

Sometimes you want to market to one sometimes the other. There’s actually a lot to be said for marketing to an in-group, especially if you don’t have to pay to reach those not in your target audience. When you make your prospects feel special, they’re more likely not only to do business with you, but to maintain an ongoing business relationship. You make them feel appreciated, you talk to them on their own level. Just as with my headline, I’m identifying you, my reader, as someone sophisticated enough to be curious about the headline and to read the article. After all, I could have said “snobs vs. the masses” or “the elite vs. the common people.” But those are so…ordinary! You get no satisfaction from conquering those molehills.

When you write for the masses, make your language as accessible as possible. But when you’re seeking a much more select audience, jargon and “secrets” have their place, if not done to excess. Not only does your audience feel like you’re talking directly to them, they feel like you’re one of them.

I was inspired to write this after reading copywriter Ivan Levison’s critique of an ad with the headline,

Levison wrote,

It seems to me that this is less a headline than a secret message that needs decoding, and make no mistake. Writing an ambiguous headline like this  can destroy readership of an ad, email, Web page, brochure, you name it.

Now, I’ve been involved at least a bit with energy and environmental issues all the way back to the 1970s, and to me, this headline made perfect sense. The grid is the infrastructure that transmits the nation’s electricity. The footprint, of course, is a carbon footprint: the impact on our environment, and specifically on climate change.

Levison is right that the headline needs decoding—but he’s wrong in seeing it as ineffective. Those who grapple daily with issues of climate change and CO2 in electricity transmission will be immediately clued in that this ad is for them.

Whether it made sense to place this two-page ad in Business Week is another question; it might have had far better results in something like the trade magazine Electric Light & Power, where actual prospects would be a much higher percentage of total readership. And it probably didn’t need two whole pages. So from a frugality point of view, the campaign could certainly be improved, even if advertising—the most expensive marketing method—is a big part of the mix (which, as regular readers of this newsletter and my books on frugal marketing understand, it doesn’t have to be).

But if the goal was to select and attract those people in the general big business community with key decision-making roles in power generation, it was probably effective. They were marketing to the cognoscenti.

Match Message, Medium, and Audience–if you want your marketing to succeed.

That sounds simple, but what does it actually mean? It means that you talk to people differently depending on what you want to say (message), how you’re choosing to reach them (medium), and who they are (audience).

So, for instance, you wouldn’t put a screaming “Crazy Eddie”-style radio commercial on a quiet classical station. And nor would you advertise your upcoming lectures on Mozart’s influences from Bach to Haydn on a brassy, teen-oriented Facebook page.

This sounds obvious, right? Then why do so many marketers goof around with stuff like (these are REAL examples):

• A radio spot for folksinger Michelle Shocked that made her sound like a Kiss/Black Sabbath-style heavy-metal rocker–and aired on an acoustic-album-oriented station that would have been perfect for her real sound
• A district-wide direct-mail piece from a candidate for State Representative in a three-town district, with literature that only talked about his own town and ignored the two others (not surprisingly, he lost)
• Twitter feeds that are 100% mindless sales pitches and show zero understanding of how to use the medium effectively
• An ad in my local family-oriented newspaper that actually used the headline, “Sex: Now that I Have Your Attention”–to promote a car dealership!

The truly wonderful thing about marketing in the 21st century is how easy it is to find the exact audience you want, and to target those exact consumers with a message about them, through a medium that they use. If you try to create one marketing message to be all things to all people, you end up being nothing to anyone.

If you want to know more about this concept, I discuss it in much more detail in my marketing books, and especially Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (buy them together and you’ll receive a substantial discount).