I’ve just realised I’ve committed a cardinal sin. How can I expect you to read my blog without knowing who the hell I am? Am I worth listening to? Am I a reliable observer?
Well the answer to the last question is easy…no, I am not a reliable observer. I have 10 years of various marketing, brand and advertising experience. I have my opinions and you have yours. All I can ask is that you bear with me and hear me out, as we venture out on this path of marketing discovery. And though the road may be rocky ahead with ravines to cross and mountains to climb and all that kinda stuff, I hope the journey will be, at worst, interesting.
Whatever the case may be, the time for synoptic circumlocutions has now passed…the final countdown has begun. But before lift-off commences, it may be worthwhile making a small but important point.
Marketing is in crisis.
Much has been written and said about the demise of marketing. As much as large corporations talk the talk about being a customer-centric organisation, rarely do they walk the walk. When were you last on the receiving end of really great service? (That’s a rhetorical question by the way.) Brands promise certain experiences and raise expectations through their communications. Then you wander down to one of their stores and when you ask for assistance you are faced with an 18 year old sales assistant who does not assist you in the sale (in fact they often mislead or confuse). Man, it gets me mad and I know I’m not alone. (I’ll be writing about linking the brand promise to employee behaviour in a future post.)
With increasing media fragmentation, brands are finding it increasingly difficult to get their messages across. We can screen out TV commercial messages via Tivo and DVD Recorders. Indeed, many are doing away with their TV completely, setting up their 20-inch widescreen iMac centre-stage in the lounge and feeding it with content from iTunes, DVDs and other web-based media services. They are asserting an iconoclastic form of control over their media lives.
Over-capacity, a perceived lack of differentiation, and commoditization are common characteristics of markets across the developed world. More people than ever have a marketing orientation, with many aware of and hostile to the machinations of the marketing machine – Douglas Coupland’s prescient and seminal book Generation X published in 1992 summed up this attitude perfectly with a chapter entitled ‘I am not a target market’. The trust we have in organisations, let alone one another, is at an all time low. For us professional communicators, this makes things tricky.
What do we need to do? We need to be more innovative and creative than ever before to make punters sit up, listen and take notice. We need to involve, engage and entertain consumers to attract them. Sometimes, being different isn’t the only way, sometimes we need to tease them, sometimes we need to play heard to get. Brands should look to tell great stories, that are authentic and likely to spread (I tip my hat to Seth Godin here).
Above all, from an advertising point of view, I believe we must seek to make an emotional connection with people, to reach out and touch people, be it to make them laugh, feel uncomfortable, surprised etc. Festinger, with his Cognitive Dissonance Theory, told us long ago in 1959 that people decide emotionally and justify with logic, and yet how many communications do we see that focus purely on the rational factors, ordained from above by super-analytical and consumer illiterate Finance Directors-slash-CEOs. The battle lines have been drawn…
Well the answer to the last question is easy…no, I am not a reliable observer. I have 10 years of various marketing, brand and advertising experience. I have my opinions and you have yours. All I can ask is that you bear with me and hear me out, as we venture out on this path of marketing discovery. And though the road may be rocky ahead with ravines to cross and mountains to climb and all that kinda stuff, I hope the journey will be, at worst, interesting.
Whatever the case may be, the time for synoptic circumlocutions has now passed…the final countdown has begun. But before lift-off commences, it may be worthwhile making a small but important point.
Marketing is in crisis.
Much has been written and said about the demise of marketing. As much as large corporations talk the talk about being a customer-centric organisation, rarely do they walk the walk. When were you last on the receiving end of really great service? (That’s a rhetorical question by the way.) Brands promise certain experiences and raise expectations through their communications. Then you wander down to one of their stores and when you ask for assistance you are faced with an 18 year old sales assistant who does not assist you in the sale (in fact they often mislead or confuse). Man, it gets me mad and I know I’m not alone. (I’ll be writing about linking the brand promise to employee behaviour in a future post.)
With increasing media fragmentation, brands are finding it increasingly difficult to get their messages across. We can screen out TV commercial messages via Tivo and DVD Recorders. Indeed, many are doing away with their TV completely, setting up their 20-inch widescreen iMac centre-stage in the lounge and feeding it with content from iTunes, DVDs and other web-based media services. They are asserting an iconoclastic form of control over their media lives.
Over-capacity, a perceived lack of differentiation, and commoditization are common characteristics of markets across the developed world. More people than ever have a marketing orientation, with many aware of and hostile to the machinations of the marketing machine – Douglas Coupland’s prescient and seminal book Generation X published in 1992 summed up this attitude perfectly with a chapter entitled ‘I am not a target market’. The trust we have in organisations, let alone one another, is at an all time low. For us professional communicators, this makes things tricky.
What do we need to do? We need to be more innovative and creative than ever before to make punters sit up, listen and take notice. We need to involve, engage and entertain consumers to attract them. Sometimes, being different isn’t the only way, sometimes we need to tease them, sometimes we need to play heard to get. Brands should look to tell great stories, that are authentic and likely to spread (I tip my hat to Seth Godin here).
Above all, from an advertising point of view, I believe we must seek to make an emotional connection with people, to reach out and touch people, be it to make them laugh, feel uncomfortable, surprised etc. Festinger, with his Cognitive Dissonance Theory, told us long ago in 1959 that people decide emotionally and justify with logic, and yet how many communications do we see that focus purely on the rational factors, ordained from above by super-analytical and consumer illiterate Finance Directors-slash-CEOs. The battle lines have been drawn…
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