If you don't have a sense of humor you don't belong in marketing. Paul Barsch Of Marketing Profs: Daily Fix demonstrates this in a post entitled: "Top Ten Worst Marketing Speeches." His tongue-in-cheek article suggests topics such as:
"'Customer Service is for Sissies:'
Customers should be happy they get any support, much less stellar customer support...This speech details top 10 ways to avoid full lifecycle support and the associated service costs..."
"'The Right Hand Doesn’t Care What the Left Hand is Doing'
How better to improve customer satisfaction than by cross selling and up-selling products and services to customers that they already own or use? Plus, there is comedic value in watching customer service agents pitch irrelevant offers to your most valuable and profitable customers."
Paul's article inspired me to come up with some worst marketing speech candidates of my own:
"Value Propositions are for Wimps"
Someone who's never written a line of copy in their life explains how any copywriter worth their salt should be able to write a headline that has customers falling over themselves to buy ill-conceived, over-priced, commoditized products for which they have absolutely no use. Any writer who can't do this just doesn't have the right stuff."Declining Sales? Don't Just Stand There, Raise the Price!"
This speech explains how to leverage an obscure strategy whereby companies can maintain, even grow sales, simply by raising prices when traffic and/or transactions decline. It's so easy it's a wonder everyone isn't doing it.
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