Marketers must stop doing what people hate.

If you’re a fan of my book Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins, you’ll know that I advocate a movement toward a human-centered approach to marketing. And the first step in that process is to STOP DOING WHAT PEOPLE HATE.

Sounds, simple, right?

It’s not.

Marketers are under constant pressure to do things that we know our customers hate because:

• the tactic works
• our competitors do it
• we’re afraid not to
• we’ve always done it that way

Here is one of my pet peeves. Pop-up ads.

Google posted this stat:

Every research report concludes that consumers LOATHE pop-up ads. And while pop-ups might slightly increase sign-up rates for a newsletter, at this point, there’s no rational marketing professional who can believe that people like these maddening interruptions.

But if you ask a marketer why they do it, they say “because they work.”

But people hate them.