Well that is Bill Hicks ripping marketing a new one, heard about this via Johnnie Moore’s weblog where he also mention he’s starting a new collaborative blog. The the new blog is called Marketing 2.0 in which some very respectable marketing bloggers are getting together to post on how marketing is changing.
I rather like Johnnie’s inaugural post where he even questions the validity of marketing 2.0, I mean, doesn’t marketing just go away if it’s built into the DNA of products and experiences?
But maybe we’re just kidding ourselves. Us marketing types have always had a real talent for that, haven’t we?
I wonder if we’re just repeating that tired old solution for any other substandard product with a dodgy customer image - the rebrand! Hey folks this isn’t nasty old Marketing, this is New Improved Marketing NOW with Added Authenticity…
Reminds me very much of victor papanek’s sentement from his seminal book from the 70’s called Design for the Real World
Now, both me and Johnnie do have one other thing in common and that is we are from England, which I think gives us a somewhat different view of marketing, because to be quite honest America is a nation that has been marketing better than any other nation in history. What we often refer to with slight disdain as that American razzmatazz is in fact the American marketing machine revving up into high gear.
That being said advertising is becoming less effective, customers are becoming more aware of the impact of their consumption, are holding companies to higher standards, and are seeking more meaning out of the products and services they buy. As post war marketing theory, segments, demographics, focus groups, monolithic ad networks and the mass market are becoming increasingly irrelevant companies have to look for new ways to engage.
Hi Karl, thanks for the linklove and comments. Yes, I am conscious of being British and therefore cynical as well as irreverant.
I did think of an analogy to the British Empire - that maybe the Brits deserve a tiny acknowledgement for semi-voluntarily dismantling the empire instead of waiting for it to be torn down. And then maybe we could claim to have pioneered the “rebrand” by coming up with the Commonwealth. Though I’m not quite sure what the lesson of that would be !
Hey Johnnie, great to hear from you, and yes, an interesting question to ponder, what would a dismantling of the marketing empire look like
Hi Karl
I don’t know if it’s just me getting jaded (and I’m too young for that, honest I am), but the Marketing 2.0 thing is wearing thin on me a bit. I followed your link to the blog and read down the first screen of entries and it just reminded me of old wisdom dressed in shiny new clothes.
I had to scroll through a database of collected articles/posts a couple of days ago to look for something and I noticed that we’re going through these waves talking about things that my dad would say was “stating the bloody obvious”. First it was “conversation”, then “attention” (go big or go home, differentiate, niche etc), then “storytelling”, then “authenticity”, and now “it’s built into the product /experience dna”.
Basically what we’re all talking about is building great products/services, reaching out to customers, forming a relationship with them and using this cycle to evolve. When I studied marketing 20 years ago that’s what we were talking about too.
I guess there’s some truth in the old “nothing new under the sun” adage.
Your blog’s great btw. I’ve been reading for a long time and it’s always interesting and thought-provoking.
=) Marc