There is a scene in the movie “Chef” that I think about too often. The titular chef, Jon Favreau, is convinced by the restaurant’s owner, Dustin Hoffman, to play it safe and follow the crowd’s favorites when serving a prestigious food critic, rather than the special new menu the chef had planned. The critic is not impressed and criticizes the chef, who then tears him to pieces on camera in a moment that goes viral. As a result, he is 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 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.
Confident 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 generate revenue.
In essence, it’s the same problem that individuals face, which is what mental toughness experts call approval addiction: where people consistently avoid making risky decisions because they’re worried about not getting the approval of others. This sends mixed messages to your audience, and mixed messages reduce revenue because your customer doesn’t know which message to act on. So they choose the safest option: not engaging.
Approval addiction in action
I know this pattern because I’ve lived it. In my religious tradition, members of the congregation deliver sermons. I don’t get asked this very often and a friend told me why. He said, “Zac, when you talk, most people like it. But some people get offended.” I’m very bold when I preach, so this wasn’t surprising. But the surprising thing was that they kept asking me to talk.
A few years ago, my wife and I commiserated over plummeting sales. My wife said to me, “I don’t understand. You piss people off at church, but they like it when you teach. Why doesn’t that rub off on potential clients?”
That’s when it hit me. Right or wrong, I wasn’t afraid of offending people in church. But I was terrified of offending a potential client. I was pulling my punches and my potential clients could sense it. That addiction to approval was killing my sales.
The most effective marketing teams I’ve seen are those that don’t try to be offensive. But they’re not even afraid of it. They know that to do their job well they have to risk being offensive. What does it actually look like?
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Being offensive
I was trained as a professional speaker by Steve Siebold. He made millions of dollars as a speaker by making people feel bad about themselves, especially business executives and decision makers. Siebold taught me that you have to show people that they have a headache and then convince them that 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 see 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 a buyer takes action. Fun marketing removes tension. You risk distracting your target customers away from where you most need them to be, 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 you can create that tension by showing them that they have a headache. You can expose a mistaken belief or challenge a current solution.
Airbnb and Apple do a good job in this regard. 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 the functional superiority of the PC.
Where most marketing is missing
I keep seeing soft marketing language. It doesn’t matter what industry or geographic region. Marketing is toothless. These campaigns are clearly created through pre-arranged marketing and this eliminates any advantage they might have.
A wizard on a unicorn telling me to check out your website isn’t risky. It just catches my attention. This isn’t enough to drive sales and that’s where most marketing is lacking.
While most marketers consider themselves risk takers, the campaigns they are creating don’t turn out that way. Often, what begins as an edgy campaign is killed by committees that are too afraid to offend. With each cut, they eliminate just a small portion of what would have made the marketing stand out in the first place.
The brief goes through the legal department, then the brand, then the CMO, then the agency, and with each handoff someone softens an aspect. Nobody killed the idea. The trial happened.
This is the danger of concerted marketing. Create marketing that satisfies the public but doesn’t move the market. No person in the room is a coward per se. Collectively, they are.
Dancing with chaos
All of this makes me think about comedy and wonder 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 marketing. They said that for something to be fun, it has to dance with chaos and the unknown. It’s the comedian’s job to find that line between appropriate and inappropriate and tread it until he sings, avoiding getting to the point of becoming cruel or remaining so safe as to be predictable.
Marketing is the same way. When I say marketing must be offensive, that doesn’t mean the marketing suits Trey Parker and Matt Stone when they wrote “The Book of Mormon,” a musical that mocks the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But they still have to dance that line between appropriate and inappropriate in 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 feel embarrassed.
If you find yourself wondering if 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 leaves their assumptions intact?
- Would anyone disagree with what you said? Otherwise it’s useless.
- Is this saying true, even if it costs us business? This will push people to self-select.
- Is it aimed at a specific buyer or a general audience?
- Did we create it or did we remix someone else’s safe idea?
Safe marketing seems right, until it silently fails
The scariest thing about bad marketing is that it’s rarely loud. At least the 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 actionable feedback. It’s easy to tell if he’s crossed the line or not even close.
Safe marketing provides neither signals nor progress. It gets approved, becomes active, gets little attention, and disappears. But I find that marketing teams don’t lack technique or creativity. They lack courage. A/B testing cannot solve this problem.
Most marketing teams have a courtesy problem. Until that changes, teams will continue to produce marketing that feels safe internally, but barely moves customers externally. What you feel is safest for you is safe for your customers, and customers don’t change when they feel comfortable.
