The MeNotWe of Marketing

Man, I love football and as many of you know, I am a HUGE fan of the Los Angeles Rams who, of course, won the Super Bowl in dramatic fashion last season and became media darlings. One of the coolest things about the team is coach Sean McVay’s now famous “WeNotMe” slogan and mentality. The team does everything together and McVay’s mantra has generated some very unselfish play from such “unmanageable” superstar diva players like Odell Beckham Jr, Jalen Ramsey and Von Miller. So WeNotMe works….for football teams.

In marketing, we want to do exactly the opposite of this and be more like MeNotWe in our communications with the ME being the customer. Let me give you an example of a website I’m rewriting just this week based on some brand messaging I created.

OLD SITE: The upper navigation of the website has the company logo and the following drop-down menus

What We Do
Who We Serve
What We Think
Who We Are

And that is certainly one way to organize all of those elements on a b2b website— IF the customer is really interested in you. —Which they are not. They are actually interested in their own problems, issues, etc. and searching for solutions and wise guides across the entire World Wide Web. So looking at this with the CUSTOMER as the hero, I’m going to change it to something like:

Your Problems/Worries
How We Help You
Let Us Guide You

And yes, as obvious and easy as that sounds, I do get paid to do this because KNOWING what to do and actually DOING it are two separate things. The new website will be VASTLY more successful too because the site will INVITE the customer into a story that the customer needs to play out. A story where they are the hero, slaying any nasty dragons in their way and ending up smiling and raising their glass to a successful conquest once it’s all over—and the credits roll. We all LOVE this story. We see it play out over and over again in movies, TV, books, video games and in our own lives as well.

Do you see the difference?

MeNotWe marketing is much better and it will ATTRACT an audience looking for a knowledgable guide to solve their problems much better than the old-school “let’s bother and annoy them until they unsubscribe or submit” approach. And then we can be FOR our customers, be THEIR fans instead of requiring they become ours. That’s a big shift and a huge deal. We start to lead with empathy in our marketing efforts instead of “data” and add tons of value to people’s lives with our products and services.

So right now, go and look at your website, your social media feeds, your last few emails — are they MeNotWe? I’m telling you, making the customer the hero, taking the spotlight off of you and putting it onto them will transform your marketing. Just don’t tell Sean McVay. 🙂 GO RAMS!