Useful Marketing - what can we learn from Dannon?

Years ago when I was in helping an ad-agency turn digital, myself and another hacker kept persuading management to add value in form of complementary web services (small apps that help the consumer automate or introduce information technology in the product's domain). They ran back to old school marketing during the recession, but we managed to make a few highly successful web applications that still nurture the user-brand relationship to this day.

The problem with some people in marketing is, that they view the emotional branding paradigm as an excuse for slacking on delivering real value. Their idea is, that you can completely disconnect the content from the image, and just paint pictures or write stories however poor the product design or actual communication with the user is (sometimes there's almost no communication, just top-down bombardment).

In highly successful examples this leads to focusing on joy instead of flavor (drinks), image instead of performance (cars), healthy lifestyle instead of product utility (sports apparel). However, often the product actually lacks in some way and nothing is done to compensate for it. Instead, marketers try to drive the consumption by shifting the focus from the actual product to some vaguely related subject or a fairy-tale that strikes a chord with the target audience.

To tell you the truth, I lost faith in marketing as a separate service. I just felt that products should be superbly designed, so as to market themselves or allow marketing to focus on the actual features of the product. In software, that's stupid-simple. The product _is_ the useful set of features. No need to add value in form of vaguely related useful attachments. I think Evernote is doing a great job at this.

I do understand that some product categories just can't innovate any further (most of Dannon's portfolio), so they must resort to emotional branding and adding value in form of additional useful features, collectibles, or god have mercy on their poor souls, gamification. I'm just glad software doesn't have that problem. We can just keep innovating and improving our product in tact with all the new disruptive technologies and methodologies, adding value with product design at the core, not by adding flourishes and perks.