My four year old knows bad marketing

My four year old just started Montessori school, and she is an angel at school.  But then she comes home, regresses to age two, raises hell, and generally brings me to my knees.  I’m told this is normal as a child adjusts to their first full-day schooling experience.  It’s either that or evidence of my poor parenting skills. 

This week I have realized there were some marketing parallels in the behavior I see.  This post is about making lemonade from a four-year-old lemon.

Yes, my four-year-old child knows bad marketing.  Here are three rules of bad marketing courtesy of her:

1. If you want to say something, yell it from your current location, even if your mother is on another floor of the house.  This is what I call “come to me” marketing.  Bad marketing is putting your message out there and expecting people to come to hear it.  Good marketing is going to where people are (mentally, physically, temporally) and delivering the message directly to them.

2. Get someone’s attention, but fail to deliver a compelling message.  “Mom. Mom.  Mom.  Mom.”  “Yes, sweetie?”  Then forget what you had to say or make something up.  Bad marketing is all about bad messages.  Good marketing is about getting attention AND good messaging.

3. Throw a tantrum to get attention.  Show how dire things are by kicking and screaming because the Hello Kitty stickers are missing.  Bad marketers make their appeals apocalyptic and scare away the audience.  Good marketers show how bad can become good.  They are inspirational and aspirational.

So there you have it.

Oh, and a bonus: A free copy of Robin Hood to the first person to offer parenting advice as a comment on this post.