Contrary to what some marketers think, you can never outsmart the masses. Small, ignorant sects maybe, but knowledge in numbers is a powerful thing. If you think as a marketer that you can fool your target audience into buying your product, you’re obtuse and presumptuous.

Just yesterday, I blogged about one Sony marketing company that pretended to run a consumer fansite in support of Sony’s struggling PlayStation Portable. They did a horrible job acting as “hip” youth and their disconnect showed in everything they tried to lie about on the site including copy and terribly fake videos aimed to go viral. I can only imagine the company in a planning meeting thinking they could outsmart consumers. Ironically, they got called out by every major game site on the internet, not to mention Wired news, and it’s only a matter of time before the story hits major networks and both the marketing company and Sony take a significant business hit. Remember: Marketing is about the glamorization of products, not blatant lying.

A short time back, I consulted with one company that erroneously thought they could start a blog with the ulterior motive of directly hard-selling products to their audience. They all but said, “people will want to visit our site just to get pitched to.” They were marketers and had no clue what they were doing. There is nothing wrong in using a blog to indirectly drive business. I highly recommend it and can’t say enough about how much business Smooth Harold has helped me close over the past two years. But there should always be an intrinsic value to any blog. Don’t ever compromise your authenticity for some web pipe dream.