There’s a scene in the movie “Chef” that I think about too often. The titular chef, Jon Favreau, is convinced by the restaurant owner, Dustin Hoffman, to play it safe and go with the crowd favorites when serving a prestigious food critic, rather than the special new menu the chef had planned. The critic is unimpressed and lambastes the chef, who then tears him apart on camera in a moment that goes viral. As a result, he’s fired. Not because he took a risk but because he didn’t.
I see marketing teams make the same mistake over and over. They run copycat campaigns, choose the same colors as everyone else (every streaming app icon on your TV is white text on a blue background) and do marketing by agreement. When they fail to stand out, they get fired.
Safe marketing fails not because of limited creativity or technique but because it avoids tension. When messaging is driven by approval rather than truth, it becomes invisible — and invisible marketing doesn’t move customers or drive revenue.
At the core, it’s the same problem individuals face, which is what mental toughness experts call approval addiction — where individuals constantly avoid making risky decisions because they’re worried it won’t get the approval of others. This sends mixed messages to your audience, and mixed messages kill revenue because your customer doesn’t know which message to act on. So they choose the safest option: not to engage.
Approval addiction in action
I know this pattern because I’ve lived it. In my religious tradition, members of the congregation deliver the sermons. I don’t get asked very often, and a friend told me why. He said, “Zac, when you speak, most people like it. But some people get offended.” I’m very bold when I preach, so it wasn’t surprising. But what was surprising is that they keep asking me to speak.
A few years ago, my wife and I were commiserating about a sales slump. My wife said to me, “I don’t get it. You piss people off at church, but they love it when you teach. Why isn’t that transferring to prospects?”
That’s when it hit me. Right or wrong, I wasn’t afraid to offend people at church. But I was terrified to offend a prospect. I was pulling my punches, and my prospects could sense it. That approval addiction was killing my sales.
The most effective marketing teams I’ve seen are the ones that don’t strive to be offensive. But they aren’t afraid of it either. They know that to do their job well, they have to risk being offensive. What does that actually look like?
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.
On being offensive
I was trained as a professional speaker by Steve Siebold. He’s made millions of dollars as a speaker by making people feel bad about themselves — particularly business executives and decision-makers. Siebold taught me that you have to show people they have a headache, then convince them it’s a migraine.
Why? Because unless a buyer has a moment where they realize they’re uncomfortable, they won’t change. From what I’m seeing out there now, most marketing relies on safe messages presented in an entertaining way, which, in my opinion, is the worst approach they could take.
When you remove tension from your message, you remove the reason for a buyer to act. Entertaining marketing removes tension. It risks distracting your target customers away from where you most need them to be — realizing that their headache is actually a migraine and you’ve got the pain reliever.
Effective marketing must be risky to inspire the desired changes you want to see in your target audience. There are lots of ways you can create that tension — showing them they have a headache. You can expose a flawed belief or challenge a current solution.
Airbnb and Apple do a good job with this. Airbnb’s recent ad campaign comparing its listings to the traditional hotel experience challenges the belief that hotels are the best vacation option. Apple’s “I’m a Mac/PC” commercial effectively challenged the belief in PC functional superiority.
Where most marketing misses
I keep noticing soft marketing language. It doesn’t matter which industry or geographic region. Marketing is toothless. These campaigns are clearly created through marketing by agreement, and it kills any edge they might have.
A wizard on a unicorn telling me to check out your website isn’t risky. It merely captures my attention. That’s not enough to drive sales — and that’s where most marketing misses.
Although most marketers see themselves as risk-takers, the campaigns they’re creating don’t come out that way. Often, what starts as an edgy campaign is killed by committees too afraid to offend. With each cut, they shave off just a little bit of what would’ve made the marketing stand out in the first place.
The brief goes through legal, then brand, then the CMO, then the agency, and at each handoff, someone softens an edge. No one person killed the idea. The process did.
That’s the danger of marketing by agreement. It creates marketing that pleases the room but doesn’t move the market. No one person in the room is a coward on their own. Collectively, they are.
Dancing with chaos
All this has me wondering about comedy and asking why some comedians make it while others don’t. I recently heard a statement on a podcast that explains the difference between success and failure in comedy — and in marketing. They said that for something to be funny, it has to dance with chaos and the unknown. It’s a comedian’s job to find that line between appropriate and inappropriate and vibrate it until it sings, while avoiding going so far that it becomes cruel or staying so safe it’s predictable.
Marketing is the same way. When I say marketing has to be offensive, that doesn’t mean marketing becomes Trey Parker and Matt Stone when they wrote “The Book of Mormon,” a musical that lampoons the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But they still have to dance on that line of appropriate and inappropriate within the context of the problem.
Target customers should feel uncomfortable enough about their problem that they want to change, but not so uncomfortable that they’re embarrassed.
If you find yourself wondering whether your marketing is offensive enough, I want you to run your last five campaigns through this filter:
- Does this challenge a belief your buyer currently holds, or does it leave their assumptions intact?
- Would anyone disagree with what you’ve said? If not, it’s useless.
- Is this saying something true, even if it costs us deals? This will make people self-select out.
- Is this for a specific buyer or a generic audience?
- Did we create this, or did we remix someone else’s safe idea?
Safe marketing feels right — until it fails silently
The scariest thing about bad marketing is that it’s rarely loud. At least big failures come with feedback. Unfortunately, most bad marketing is silent. There’s no feedback signal and no way to know where it went wrong.
Bold marketing provides usable feedback. It’s easy to tell whether it crossed the line or didn’t even approach it.
Safe marketing provides neither signal nor progress. It gets approved, goes live, gets little attention and disappears. But I find marketing teams don’t lack technique or creativity. They lack courage. A/B testing can’t fix this.
Most marketing teams have a politeness problem. Until that changes, teams will continue producing marketing that feels safe internally, but barely moves customers externally. What feels safest to you feels just as safe to your customers, and customers don’t change when they feel comfortable.
The post Marketing that pleases everyone converts no one appeared first on MarTech.