By Wesley Gunter
I’m sure you’ve read the news lately about the brilliant marketing strategy taken by The Ministry of Finance to promote the upcoming budget - ‘Ministry of Finance pays for Instagram 'influencers' to promote Budget 2018’.
Firstly, this article is not meant to slam bloggers. As a marketer and owner of an agency I work with them on a regular basis to promote my clients. However, using fashion and lifestyle bloggers to promote a financial product to the masses is tantamount to eating soup kambing with chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant… Just because everyone in the room thinks chopsticks is an effective tool, it’s not necessarily gonna work.
There are just so many things I want to rant about regarding this whole scenario from society at large to just how stupid it sounds but I’m going to just speak from a marketing viewpoint and silently scream to myself…
The Numbers Game…
One of my greatest pet peeves about how marketing and PR has evolved is how everybody loves pegging it to numbers and statistics. Not everything is a god damn algorithm for Christ’s sakes..
PR IS NOT FUCKING SALES! There I said it! … Moving on now let’s get to the point. You can’t just make a marketing decision based on numbers alone and just because an ‘influencer’ has 3 million followers on her Instagram because she has silky smooth skin, she’s going to be the best marketing tool for your product and audience.
As much as this may be common sense, many marketers have lost the plot and are sold just because of the number of likes and followers REGARDLESS of the influencer’s background and what they actually do.
Which brings me to my next point..
What’s the objective???
It’s not surprising that the majority of Singaporeans who eagerly anticipate what the G will roll out every year with the budget are above 30. If you’ve got surmounting bills to pay, mouths to feed and probably an aging parent with some illness to look after while earning a meagre salary you’re gonna take every bit of charity you can get. The budget is not just ‘freebies’ to some, it’s a fucking matter of survival.
Now let’s shift focus to our adorable youth. The ‘disruptors’ of our society who wouldn’t bat an eyelid when it comes to splurging on that fancy meal or just going on a ‘sabbatical’ to ‘discover themselves’ in some far-flung destination. This is of course a generalisation of our ‘spoilt’ youth as branded by the older Singaporeans which is far from the truth. But by looking at the ‘influencers’ selected by MOF they tend to fall into this ‘fluff’ category
I’m sure there are many younger Singaporeans who depend on the budget to get by. It’s a shame that the ‘influencers’ used by MOF don’t seem to be a good representative of what younger Singaporeans would want from a government initiative
Do you know what you’re selling?
So we covered the problem with using a wrong marketing tool for a wrong audience. Now let’s talk about the human element here. If you wanted to sell nail polish to a bunch of teenagers would you use 45 year old retiree with a pot belly to do the job? I really don’t get what a bunch of happy go lucky millennials that spend their time eating at fancy restaurants and wearing little clothes would have something useful to say about a financial product which even the people that came up with the budget have trouble explaining.
I am all for ‘dumbing’ down something to make it understandable to your average joe. But how can you get someone that doesn’t even understand the fundamentals of your product to explain it to the masses?? That’s like getting a guy in China who just learned the English language for the past year to teach a classroom of foreigners modern literature. Bottomline: No one is going to learn jack shit.
So in a nutshell the problem doesn’t lie with bloggers but the medium used. It’s honestly pretty appalling to me how such a huge government body which is the authority on everything to do with money in this country can be so clueless when it comes to marketing their own product..
I’m sure the Ministry of Finance has enough budget in their coffers to hire a decent marketing and PR agency no?
Wesley Gunter is the owner and PR Director of Right Hook Communications (www.righthook.com.sghttps://www.righthook.com.sg/), a boutique agency that loves to push boundaries and buttons
I’m sure you’ve read the news lately about the brilliant marketing strategy taken by The Ministry of Finance to promote the upcoming budget - ‘Ministry of Finance pays for Instagram 'influencers' to promote Budget 2018’.
Firstly, this article is not meant to slam bloggers. As a marketer and owner of an agency I work with them on a regular basis to promote my clients. However, using fashion and lifestyle bloggers to promote a financial product to the masses is tantamount to eating soup kambing with chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant… Just because everyone in the room thinks chopsticks is an effective tool, it’s not necessarily gonna work.
There are just so many things I want to rant about regarding this whole scenario from society at large to just how stupid it sounds but I’m going to just speak from a marketing viewpoint and silently scream to myself…
The Numbers Game…
One of my greatest pet peeves about how marketing and PR has evolved is how everybody loves pegging it to numbers and statistics. Not everything is a god damn algorithm for Christ’s sakes..
PR IS NOT FUCKING SALES! There I said it! … Moving on now let’s get to the point. You can’t just make a marketing decision based on numbers alone and just because an ‘influencer’ has 3 million followers on her Instagram because she has silky smooth skin, she’s going to be the best marketing tool for your product and audience.
As much as this may be common sense, many marketers have lost the plot and are sold just because of the number of likes and followers REGARDLESS of the influencer’s background and what they actually do.
Which brings me to my next point..
What’s the objective???
It’s not surprising that the majority of Singaporeans who eagerly anticipate what the G will roll out every year with the budget are above 30. If you’ve got surmounting bills to pay, mouths to feed and probably an aging parent with some illness to look after while earning a meagre salary you’re gonna take every bit of charity you can get. The budget is not just ‘freebies’ to some, it’s a fucking matter of survival.
Now let’s shift focus to our adorable youth. The ‘disruptors’ of our society who wouldn’t bat an eyelid when it comes to splurging on that fancy meal or just going on a ‘sabbatical’ to ‘discover themselves’ in some far-flung destination. This is of course a generalisation of our ‘spoilt’ youth as branded by the older Singaporeans which is far from the truth. But by looking at the ‘influencers’ selected by MOF they tend to fall into this ‘fluff’ category
I’m sure there are many younger Singaporeans who depend on the budget to get by. It’s a shame that the ‘influencers’ used by MOF don’t seem to be a good representative of what younger Singaporeans would want from a government initiative
Do you know what you’re selling?
So we covered the problem with using a wrong marketing tool for a wrong audience. Now let’s talk about the human element here. If you wanted to sell nail polish to a bunch of teenagers would you use 45 year old retiree with a pot belly to do the job? I really don’t get what a bunch of happy go lucky millennials that spend their time eating at fancy restaurants and wearing little clothes would have something useful to say about a financial product which even the people that came up with the budget have trouble explaining.
I am all for ‘dumbing’ down something to make it understandable to your average joe. But how can you get someone that doesn’t even understand the fundamentals of your product to explain it to the masses?? That’s like getting a guy in China who just learned the English language for the past year to teach a classroom of foreigners modern literature. Bottomline: No one is going to learn jack shit.
So in a nutshell the problem doesn’t lie with bloggers but the medium used. It’s honestly pretty appalling to me how such a huge government body which is the authority on everything to do with money in this country can be so clueless when it comes to marketing their own product..
I’m sure the Ministry of Finance has enough budget in their coffers to hire a decent marketing and PR agency no?
Wesley Gunter is the owner and PR Director of Right Hook Communications (www.righthook.com.sghttps://www.righthook.com.sg/), a boutique agency that loves to push boundaries and buttons
1 comment
overly opulent kids, (pretending) to live a life of excess, are being used to promote a national budget. ok... now let that sink in...
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