Good Bad Marketing

By Adam  |  11 Mar 2016 12:00:00

The other day I was going about my daily routines when I found myself on a business's website. I shan't say the name of the website because I don't want to upset anybody, but I clicked to go to a "Meet the Team" page and what I found there was (probably unintentionally) hilarious. Instead of regular photographs of the staff, there were illustrations of them and these illustrations made them all look hideous. Now, it's possible that the illustrator was going for this so that they'd be memorable, but they were hideous in such subtle ways, that I have the feeling it was most probably an accident.

Why did I want to tell you about those ugly drawings? Well, you see, I go on loads and loads of websites throughout the day and most of them I forget, since there are just so many of them, but those bad illustrations have made me remember them. Is it bad that I remember them for something bad? No, it's not because the capabilities of their illustrator will in no way correlate to the quality of the service they provide. There's a trend in the business world to be very stoic and corporate, because people are worried about appearing unprofessional, but the problem with this is that, with so many businesses around, it means that not many actually stand out. Being unprofessional can be good for you, even it's not intended.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you should intentionally go out of your way to do loads of terrible marketing, but I am saying that bad marketing can come in handy. If something you were working on didn't quite turn out as you hoped, perhaps you could just use it anyway and it will still be effective? Just be sure that it's good bad marketing and not bad bad marketing! An example of bad bad marketing might be something that was deeply offensive or which didn't really reflect anything at all about the business it was supposed to market. But if you don't even have an eCommerce website yet, then sign up to Sellr now and get started for no cost at all!