New Year’s Resolutions for the Malaysian Marketer

It’s the new year, and you, dear marketer, are still bleary from all the partying over the weekend. Now you’re drinking copious amounts of Americano while trying to drag your fuddled brain back to lucidity, pretending to read this newspaper. The idea of new year’s resolutions is laughable at this point. Fear not. Here they are for you, carefully selected from observations of some marketing gaffes of 2007.

1. I resolve to responsibly oversee the copywriting on my print advertising if I am qualified or have it professionally vetted if I am not, and not to surrender it to my MS Word’s spell and grammar checker. Not everybody can come up with bad copy that sounds good, like Samsung’s “World Best” tagline of yesteryear.
   
   
2. I resolve not to schedule the same radio ads for more than 2 weeks in a row, and certainly resolve to pull the plug after 1 month. Especially on peak hour morning shows when repetitive radio ads are as annoying as the slow traffic on Jln Tun Razak.
   
   
3. I resolve to strenuously encourage my marketing and sales executives to change their strange adopted English first names to something less cringe-inducing. I am referring to those who call themselves, for instance, Coma Tan, or Season Wong or Winky Teh.*
   
   
4. I resolve not to cave in to my CEO’s sometimes off-hand, uninformed and unhelpful pronouncements when vetting ad campaigns, in spite of my appointed advertising agency’s strenuous efforts to actively solicit them. I resolve to do my level best to end the era of egocentric ad campaigns in my lifetime.
   
   
5. I resolve not to use billboards that can be seen from the North South highway which are not run by Big Tree since they are, well, not on the North South highway. (Unless they are waaay cheaper and are legible for at least 3 seconds by a person with 6/6 vision driving at 110km/h, so what if they are lurking at the edge of oil palm plantations).
   
   
6. I resolve not to copy the Petronas TVCs since they are in a class of their own and my efforts would seem pedestrian in comparison.
   
   
7. I resolve not to pander to my advertising agency’s penchant for constructing ads which appeal to “opinion leaders” which are invariably modelled after their A/X clad, pinot-noir drinking selves and have very little to do with the Malaysian public.
   
   
8. I resolve to try originating my brand propositions and messaging in Bahasa Malaysia or in Chinese and then only translating them to English, since Nielsen reports that only 4% of the Chinese population and 2% of the Malay population speak English as their most often used language. Of course, that might end up breaking resolution #1 (please see above). Life, after all, is a series of trade offs.
   
   
9. I resolve to try to incorporate some number crunching rigour to my marketing budget, such as those fancy marketing ROI tools being bandied about around town by some ad agencies and consulting firms, and also to make sure any allocation for purchasing them comes on top of my existing budget.
   
   
10. I resolve to stop using scratch cards or fake “winning lottery tickets” in my promotional mailers because, while they are depressingly effective, they do so much to bring down the dignity of what it means to be a human being.
    

There you go. Now, email me who you think “inspired” those resolutions above and I’ll send you a mystery gift. ;-)


* These are not real people and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental. And also, well, slightly tragic. Although I must admit “Winky” is kind of cute.

(as seen in "The Sun", January 2nd 2008. e-paper link here.)