Marketing To Smart People

Is marketing to smart people different from marketing to everybody else? Or, to put it another way, should someone's IQ make a difference in the form and content of marketing messages you direct at that person?

Well, of course it should. That's why we write articles and put them on websites. That's why Harvard Business Review articles and technical white papers are used as selling tools. No kidding.

Okay, so I'm wondering about two marketing practices which seem intuitively counterproductive when the obvious intended target is the intellect. Perhaps someone can explain the theory behind them.



The first is the practice of citing figures that say your clients are more successful than non-clients. SAP is running a TV commercial that says its customers are 32% more profitable. Bain says on its homepage that its clients outperform the market 4-to-1. (I do like 4-to-1 better. It sounds like a score. I wonder: is SAP using Bain?) The obvious issue here is that correlation is not causality. The clients could be successful for other reasons. It's one thing to say that Crest users have 25% fewer cavities. But that's a much more specific claim than saying you make clients richer. (Which in another context -- like financial services -- would be illegal.) And the cause-and-effect relationship between toothpaste and cavities is easier to accept.

The other practice I wonder about is charging for content on marketing sites. McKinsey does this, for example, with its premium McKinsey Quarterly articles. A subscription to premium content costs $150 yearly. There could only be three possible reasons to do this. The first is to help McKinsey recover some of the costs for publishing these articles. The second is to limit distribution of the articles. The third is to create an image of exclusivity. When the point is to attract smart people with lots of money, all three reasons seem to fail on their face.

One of the advantages of marketing to smart people is that how you think becomes a legitimate issue -- as in a product demonstration where you are the product. Perhaps another issue is how smart you want your intended audience to be.