Being direct... AdVantage May 2003
Have we Lost Our Way?
"Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it has sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way" Charles Sanders Peirce 1839-1914
Why is it that our minds are not broadened or opened through our own experience - often just the opposite? Well, one of the many sources of information to which I am 'connected' through the wonder that is the Internet, ran an editorial last week entitled 'Why Marketing isn't Working Any More'.
Both the forum itself and the channel that connects one to it, may be somewhat obsessed by techno-hype, and consequently many of their visions for the future should probably be taken with a small quantity of sodium chloride - but it got me tying things together again.
Many real people 'out there' (the so-called 'targets' of our marketing efforts) are probably in the process of evolving from their fancied role of passive consumers of mass media (and the ad-messages contained therein), to becoming active participants in the alternative channels that today carry many many detailed sources of information - commercial and otherwise. It begs the question: how is this fact impacting on marketing?
The editorial mentioned an October 2002 conference presentation by a product manager from Proctor and Gamble (whose very success has been built on historic FMCG marketing concepts) - and who apparently said this: 'Branding doesn't work any more: generic goods are gaining market share; Advertising doesn't work any more: there are no mass channels of communication left; Product innovation doesn't work any more: competitors can copy and roll-out successful innovations within three months of launch'.
The editorial finally posits that there's no one answer as to why marketing doesn't work any more, except to say that everything has, and is changing. Channels are fragmenting; audiences are fragmenting; BUT most importantly of all - consumers themselves are demonstrating seriously changed behaviours. Consumers seem much busier, have less available time, and value their own time much more highly.
For example, the 'right' of brand marketers to interrupt what consumers are doing in order to 'force' a commercial message on them - may not be as acceptable to some consumers any more. And, it appears too that the appearance of near real-time technologies has made some consumers really resent these crass or low perceived-value interruptions.
Sorry that I may appear to be the harbinger of even more bad news for the world of marketing, but in a very recently published book by the Harvard Business School Press called 'How Customers Think - Essential Insights into The Mind of The Market', Professor of Marketing at the Harvard Business School - Gerald Zaltman, investigates and indeed occasionally debunks many of the pillars, around which we have based our historic assumptions of how marketing works.
On the very first page of his book, Gerald Zaltman says the following:
'Neither art nor science stands still in representing our visible and invisible worlds. Marketing, as both art and science, can't stand still either'
He goes on to quote Customer Strategy expert Elliot Ettenberg, writing in the Economist Magazine:
'Everything else has been reinvented - distribution, new product development, the supply chain. But marketing is stuck in the past'
Ettenberg argues: 'a far deeper and better understanding of consumers is a much harder task - than describing the virtues of a product. While consumers have changed beyond recognition, marketing has not.'
Zaltman suggests that these changes in consumer behaviour include increased scepticism about business (especially marketing); more assertiveness; greater sophistication; less loyalty to companies and individual brands; and major concerns about privacy and security.
Finally, he makes the point that while the world has changed; our methods for understanding consumers have not. We keep relying on familiar but ineffective research techniques and consequently misread consumers' actions and thoughts. The products and communications that we create - based on those techniques - simply aren't connecting with an emancipated consumer.
I have yet to find the time to read the whole book, but obviously plan to do so. As always, I recommend that readers acquire their own copies and make their own observations.
It still intrigues me that all the way through history, we humans don't seem to want to accept that 'new' information has the power to change our world-view, but instead it is always that which we think we 'know' (a function of our own experience) - that stops us from allowing it to do so!
Cheers