The temptation to marketing apostasy started when I heard Mark Stiving talk about features vs. benefits.

It’s relatively standard these days to focus on benefits in marketing copy — almost to the exclusion of everything else. What does the product do for the customer? How does it make their life better?

Mark said benefits copy is for people who are new to the product concept while features copy is for people who are familiar with it. For example, when grandpa doesn’t have a smartphone, you focus on the benefits. “You can keep up with the family.” But when he’s used one for a while, you focus on features. “It has a great camera and 256 GB of storage.”

That makes a lot of sense. It’s not one size fits all. Also, it hearkens back to my early days in publishing when people said “features and benefits!”

Then I heard Bob Hoffman talk about the role of fame in selling a product. Bob frequently pokes holes in sacred cows, and he says much of the “received wisdom” in marketing and advertising is nonsense.

I gradually started to question the “marketing wisdom” everyone parrots, and when I saw posts criticizing ads for not emphasizing benefits, not having an offer, or a call to action, I thought, “do we really know that? Are we actually sure that every ad needs those things?”

Sometimes you’ll hear marketers talk about the need for excitement, but I wondered …. If you’re in the library, and somebody comes in and makes a lot of noise, everyone will pay attention. Does that mean that making a lot of noise is a good strategy?

Might audiences be fatigued from hype and attention-seeking antics? Could the diminishing effectiveness of online ads be (at least in part) because we’ve all swallowed the “benefits / call to action / urgency” Kool-Aid?

I’m not a complete heretic. There are some valuable insights in the regular marketing wisdom we hear all the time. But I think we need to keep it in perspective. When you look up the most successful marketing and advertising campaigns, do they follow the oft-parroted guidelines?

Apple’s “Think Different” campaign did have a “call to action,” but the call to action wasn’t to buy their product.

Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign called people to push themselves, but there’s no reason they had to push themselves in Nike apparel.

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign made people look around for cans of coke that had their name, or a friend’s name. What did that have to do with the product?

These ads connected with people on a deep level. They painted an image of something desirable. They associated the brand with an identity. But I don’t think they would pass muster with the marketing orthodoxy I hear all the time.

What if, for example, there are stages to marketing? My brother likes to make an analogy to plowing, sowing, and reaping. Different efforts serve different purposes. Sometimes you’re breaking up the hard ground so the message has a chance. Sometimes you’re planting a seed. Other times you’re getting the sale and collecting the money.

Is the plowman failing if he doesn’t sow? Should we mock the sower because he doesn’t reap? Does every campaign to every market have to do all the work?