There’s a scene from the movie “Chef” that I think about too often. The titular chef, Jon Favreau, is convinced by restaurant owner Dustin Hoffman to play it safe and follow crowd favorites when serving a prestigious food critic, rather than the special new menu the chef had planned. The critic is unimpressed and blasts the chef, who then rips it on camera in a moment that goes viral. As a result, he was fired. Not because he took a risk, but because he didn’t.
I see marketing teams make the same mistake over and over again. They run copy 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 are fired.
Safe marketing fails not because of limited creativity or technique, but because it avoids tension. When the message is driven by approval rather than truth, it becomes invisible – and invisible marketing doesn’t move customers or generate revenue.
At its core, this is the same problem that individuals face, what mental toughness experts call approval addiction – where individuals constantly avoid making risky decisions because they fear they won’t get approval from others. This sends mixed messages to your audience, and mixed messages kill revenue because your customer doesn’t know which message to act on. They therefore choose the safest option: not to commit.
Approval Addiction in Action
I know this pattern because I have lived it. In my religious tradition, members of the congregation deliver the sermons. I don’t get asked this very often and a friend explained why. He said, “Zac, when you talk, most people like it. But some people get offended.” I am very bold when I preach, so this was not surprising. But what was surprising was that they kept asking me to speak.
A few years ago, my wife and I were complaining about declining sales. My wife said to me, “I don’t understand. You piss people off at church, but they love it when you teach. Why doesn’t that transfer to prospects?”
That’s when it hit me. Rightly or wrongly, I wasn’t afraid of offending people at church. But I was terrified of offending a prospect. I was shooting my shots and my prospects could feel it. This dependence on approval was killing my sales.
The most effective marketing teams I’ve seen are those that don’t strive to be offensive. But they’re not afraid of it either. They know that to do their job well, they must risk being offensive. What does that actually look like?
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Be offensive
I was trained as a professional speaker by Steve Siebold. He has made millions of dollars as a speaker by making people feel bad about themselves, especially business executives and policy makers. Siebold taught me that you have to show people they have a headache, then convince them it’s a migraine.
For what? Because unless a buyer has a moment where they realize they’re uncomfortable, they won’t change. From what I see now, most marketing relies on safe messages presented in an entertaining way, which in my opinion is the worst approach they can take.
When you remove tension from your message, you remove the reason a buyer takes action. Entertaining marketing eliminates tension. This risks distracting your target customers from where you need them most – realizing that their headache is actually a migraine and you have the painkiller.
Effective marketing must be risky to inspire the desired changes you want to see in your target audience. There are many ways to create this tension, by showing them that they have a headache. You can call out an erroneous belief or challenge a current solution.
Airbnb and Apple are doing a good job in this area. 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” ad effectively challenged the belief in the functional superiority of PCs.
Where most marketing falls short
I keep noticing soft marketing language. No matter the sector or geographic region. Marketing is toothless. These campaigns are clearly created through agreed-upon marketing, which removes any advantage they might have.
A wizard on a unicorn telling me to check out your website is not risky. It just captures my attention. That’s not enough to drive sales – and that’s where most marketing departments fall short.
Although most marketers consider themselves risk-takers, the campaigns they create don’t turn out that way. Often what begins as a bold campaign is killed by committees too afraid to offend. With each cut, they remove just a little bit of what would have made the marketing stand out in the first place.
The brief goes through the legal department, then to the brand, then to the CMO, then to the agency, and with each transfer, someone sweetens an advantage. Nobody killed the idea. The process did it.
This is the danger of marketing by agreement. This creates marketing that pleases the coin but doesn’t move the market. No one in the room is a coward per se. Collectively, they are.
Dancing with chaos
All of this makes me wonder about comedy and why some comedians succeed 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 had to dance with chaos and the unknown. It’s a comedian’s job to find that line between appropriate and inappropriate and rock it until it sings, while avoiding going so far that it becomes cruel or staying so safe that it’s predictable.
Marketing is the same way. When I say marketing should be offensive, that doesn’t mean marketing becomes Trey Parker and Matt Stone when they wrote “The Book of Mormon,” a musical that ridicules The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But they still have to dance on that line between what is appropriate and what is not appropriate in the context of the problem.
Target customers should feel uncomfortable enough about their problem to want to change, but not so uncomfortable that they are embarrassed by it.
If you’re wondering if your marketing is offensive enough, I want you to run your last five campaigns through this filter:
- Does this challenge a current belief of your buyer or leave their assumptions intact?
- Would anyone disagree with what you are saying? Otherwise, it’s useless.
- Is this true, even if it costs us business? This will encourage people to self-select.
- Is it aimed at a specific buyer or a generic audience?
- Did we create this or did we remix someone else’s safe idea?
Safe Marketing Seems Like a Good Thing, Until It Silently Fails
The scariest thing about bad marketing is that it is rarely loud. At least big failures come with comebacks. Unfortunately, most bad marketing remains silent. There is no feedback and no way of knowing where it went wrong.
Bold marketing provides actionable feedback. It’s easy to tell if he crossed the line or didn’t even come close.
Safe marketing brings neither signals nor progress. It’s approved, goes live, gets little attention, and disappears. But I find that marketing teams lack neither technique nor creativity. They lack courage. A/B testing cannot solve this problem.
Most marketing teams have a politeness problem. Until this changes, teams will continue to produce marketing that seems safe internally, but does little to move customers externally. What feels safest for you is also safest for your customers, and customers don’t change when they feel comfortable.
