You’re a CEO. Critical question: Would you send poor communicators to meet with your best client? Why, then, put them on your branding team? If you employ hashtaggers — whether internally or via ad agencies and PR firms — you’re doing just that. Fire your hashtaggers.
Poor communicators are branding bozos, drivers of high sales, capital, and media costs. Why did you hire them? Here’s why: you’re copying your competitors. As I conveyed to you in Be Unique or Be Ignored: The CEO’s Guide to Branding, imitation is blending, not branding.
For the unenlightened: The hashtag, a new form of jargon, is an inane, useless word or phrase, preceded by the pound-sign (#), that branding bozos — messaging minions unschooled in face-to-face selling — use to “communicate” with Millennials and Millennial wannabes via Twitter. Hashtag usage signals branding ineptitude.
Visual Examples
Below are three videos portraying the idiocy of hashtags. Imagine how this inexplicable practice, violating all rules of human behavior, will induce your customers to buy anything.
Do you want customers to buy and recommend your product, or waste time playing silly Millennial games? Why do you worship Millennials and their immature behavior? Why?!?
Explain how hashtags get customers to react to, remember, and repeat your company’s brand. What is your company’s brand? In fact, after watching the Subway and Walmart commercials below, I challenge you to define their brands!
Watch Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake mock hashtaggers. If they were to design your homepage and other branding vehicles, they’d be talking to your best customer. Yikes.
Now, watch this fatuous Subway spot, employing the same immature horseshit. How can one associate #GetYourOwn with Subway? Branding ineptitude.
Finally, watch the hashtagger couple in this vapid Walmart commercial. Please explain how #LotsOfOptions and #Awesome evoke StraightTalk or Walmart or the desire to buy? More branding ineptitude.
Final Advice
If you think the videos above are clever and funny, you shouldn’t be running a company. Seriously. Otherwise, fire your hashtaggers; they are ruining your brand.
Use common sense: it’s timeless. Treat your customers like adults; don’t insult them — just because your competitors do so. End this incessant infantilization of America.
POSTSCRIPT #1: A Selfie-Taking, Hashtagging Teenage Administration
POSTSCRIPT #2: Clueless Millennials at GWU Explain Hillary’s Presidential Credentials
POSTSCRIPT #3: Hoover Fellow: America’s College Kids Are Spoiled, Prissy Brats
POSTSCRIPT #4: US State Department Ruthlessly Mocked for “Hashtag Diplomacy”
POSTSCRIPT #5: William Deresiewicz to Megyn Kelly: Disadvantages of Elite Education
POSTSCRIPT #6: William Deresiewicz to Salon.com: Millennials Are Full of Themselves
POSTSCRIPT #7: Millennials Growing Up Unable to Cope with Failure
© 2014 Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.
About the Author
Marc Rudov is a branding advisor to CEOs,
producer of MarcRudovTV, and author of four books