Marketing Lessons from “The Joneses” 28

The movie “The Joneses” slipped under my radar. I never heard of it and knew nothing about it. My husband decided to put it on one night at our house and I loved it.

In the beginning of the movie, I felt there was something wrong with the family that moved into a huge house in a very nice suburb. There was something not right. They were not a real family.

As it turned out they were actually a team of marketers pretending to be a real family to market products to the community through “stealth marketing”.

My grandmother was sitting through the movie thinking, “this is just horrible”, while I was thinking, “this is just genius”.

Now before you get down my throat about how horrible it is to trick people, I do not condone or agree with that type ‘stealth’ of marketing. What I thought was genius was the way they approached marketing. It was all about “Social Networking”.

Here are the lessons I got from it:

Find the ‘Connectors’:

This is what Demi Moore’s character (the mother of the family) said to the father of the family, “find the connectors”. He was an injured golf player turned car sales man. He was trying to sell the products as a sales man by going to one person at a time.

She told him that it was too slow of a process and that he has to find ‘Connectors’, or what I call ‘Influencers’, that can help him sell the products to others in faster mass amounts.

For instance, she was selling hair products, therefore she went to a popular hair dresser in the community and had her hair done and built a relationship with the hair dresser. Then when the relationship was built, she introduced the hair dresser to some hair products that she discovered and loved. The hair dresser was “sold” on the product and started to use it and sell it to his customers.

The father took this lesson and used it at the golf course’s shop where he befriended the store associate by getting golf lessons from him. When the associate saw the new golf clubs that the father had and the results that you can get from them, the father recommended that his customers would love to get the same results and he should recommend the golf clubs to them, which he then did.

This last example also represents two other lessons:

Prove your product’s value

Build a relationship first

Another lesson is provide free samples: 

This is what we see in the grocery store. You get to sample the food sometimes on the weekends. In this movie, they threw a party and had all the food and drink products out for the guest to sample. When the guests asked who the caterer was, Demi showed off her box of frozen appetizers!

Care about your customers and provide a solution for their problems.

Now, here is where the story got a bit dark. Their neighbors were having marital problems, so the fake father showed the husband/neighbor some nice jewelry saying that it is what he buys to make his wife feel adored. Unfortunately, the neighbor was too much into “keeping up with the Joneses” to manage his finances and think more reasonably.

Which brings me to another lesson, never ever recommend that your customer use credit to buy your product or services.

This is just horrible business that has brought our entire economy down on its knees. Be ethical and either offer them something they can afford or just let the sale

go.

Businesses that push credit, like car dealerships, banks, and department stores should be ashamed of themselves for pushing their credit as something that is good. It is not good and us marketers should be ethical to know that debt is not good, nothing good comes of it, and we shouldn’t tell the customers that it is a good choice for them to get credit when in fact it isn’t and is only something that we are telling them to get the sale.

Those are my marketing lessons, brought to you by “The Joneses”.

Categorized as: Marketing Tips, Social Media Marketing

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