Broken promises are a terrible marketing tactic

I just saw an online advertisement for what seemed to be a neat marketing tool – a tool that measures the ‘freshness’ of your website (http://FreshWebSiteFeeling.com). As we all know, websites stale-date quickly and you have to constantly add new features, contents and visuals to keep up.

Based on the ad I saw, I thought this site would scan the site in question, evaluate the functionality / look and give it a freshness rating. Instead, the tool is just a little calculator that, when you indicate when your site was last updated, will tell you how many ‘web years’ old it is. Like the old dog years calculation – 3 human years is 21 dog years, etc. Whoppee. Nothing to do with how many dollars you invested or features you deployed.

As a tool it was lame. And my visit to the site very disappointing. I won’t ever go back – and I think less of the company as a result.

The lesson: Don't let your marketing get ahead of your company. Marketing is dangerous when you don’t have the goods to back up your promises. The business world is littered with examples like this, and it's the reason marketing has a bad reputation among many people.