3 Speed Dating Tips for Marketers

In an effort to find love, some singles even try the speed dating route, because hey, at least if it’s going to be a bad date, it’ll only last three minutes, right? And when you think about it long enough, you realize marketing is a lot like speed dating. Scared yet?

Consumers are busy, and their attention spans are shrinking. According to the Statistic Brain Research Institute, the average attention span in the US in 2015 was 8.25 seconds. Suddenly that three-minute speed-dating date seems like a lifetime to make a connection with a customer.

But never fear, while I’ve never braved the wilds of speed dating, I have seen it represented rather comically in film and television. And it’s not too much of a stretch to connect what works well in speed dating with what works well in marketing.

1. Don’t “fake it ’til you make it.” People can sniff out a fake in an instant. So, just as it’s wise to not tell a potential date you’re a doctor with three sports cars — when in reality you’re a cubicle drone with a beat up `94 Nissan Sentra — don’t tell a prospective customer your brand is something it really isn’t, just because you think it sounds cool.

Remember what Ron Johnson did to JCPenney? He thought applying Apple-esque store-styling and dumping customers’ beloved discounts was the way to bring the retailer into the future. To make it cool. Unfortunately it was all offbrand.

I couldn’t say it better than this quote from Forbes:

Boutiques/streets, wi-fi, juice bars with smoothies and coffee; no long-term customer of JCP cares about all that crap. JCP got away from what it did best.

2. Confidence is attractive. Just like in romance, no consumer wants a product or service that’s marketed meekly. There’s a reason the Old Spice Man campaign was both a viral success — garnering almost 105 million views on YouTube and a 300 percent increase of traffic to oldspice.com (opens as a PDF) — as well as a sale success.

Old Spice, a Proctor + Gamble company, targeted both men and women with the campaign. For women, it offered the fantasy of a gorgeous man, and the possibility of their current beaus smelling as good as him; and for men, it offered the opportunity to become the Old Spice Man. P&G took a legacy product, infused it with confidence and sex appeal, and made it relevant to a younger generation.

But your marketing message doesn’t have to be as sexy as the Old Spice Man to be confident. Don’t believe me? Check out this Hubspot post that details five brilliant marketing campaigns for boring products.3. Shut up and listen. No, really. It’s off-putting to go on a date and have to endure the other person blathering on about me, me, me. If all you can offer a customer is the details of how fantastic you are and what a great product and service you have to sell them … then why should they care? Unless your product or service is a solution to an immediate problem they have, quite frankly, you don’t matter.

Case in point: Virgin Group. Richard Branson and Nik Powell’s conglomeration of companies, which do everything from flight to music, got into a new business in 2015 — hotels. And what did Virgin do right? It listened to what customers didn’t like about the traditional hotel industry, what they need when they travel for business and what they’d love for when they’re taking a vacation. And after listening, Virgin delivered. Don’t believe me? Check out the article “Virgin’s First Hotel Got Rid of Everything We Hate About Hotels” and take a mini-virtual tour of the property.

So there you have it. Be yourself, be confident and make sure the conversation is a two-way street, and by the end of the night, you should be walking away with somebody’s number (just remember your manners when it comes to handling customer data!).