The End of Theory
by asi
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. Take some ‘hot’ marketing/branding guru’s recent books like Blue Ocean Strategy , Purple Cow or ‘Zag‘, blend it with a genereous portion of ‘thought leadership’ bloggers like Hugh, Richard, or Armano and the conclusion you most likely arrived at is that we are getting closer and closer to what we can call the end of marketing theory (Alternative titles could have been The End of Bullshit, or The End of Marketing as a Formula)
Let me explain. First, regarding marketing gurus’ books and preaches, Uri wrote a fantastic post about their recurrent flaws/sins: they are full of anecdotal evidence, cliches, highly generalised ‘golden rules’ etc. What’s more, their crowd-pleasing evangelistic writing about new marketing is for a large extant enjoyable hot air, e.g. "when everybody zigs, zag".
Take The Big Moo for example (a hugely entertaining read). Since its compiled of different authors, many different ideas/theories are presented. Now, while the book is truley inspiring there are oh so many inherent contradictions within the book, that a more critical read uncovers the inapplicability of its theories to real life marketing today. There is neither a magic nor a formula for being remarkable. Whats good for FMCG is irrelevant to finance services, whats working for fashion can’t be applied to airlines, the golden rules for beverage is impertinent to technology etc. One great example of my argument is Tobaccowala’s great meme in relation to engagement marketing theory: “I want my headache to go away. I don’t want a relationship with Tylenol".
But my point is not to undermine these books and authors but rather to argue that in the new lanscapes of media, technology and communications where traditional distinctions between the brand, the product, the service, the message, the values, etc. no longer exist, and where markets are conversations and there are no more secrets, spins and quasi-positioning, there comes the end of marketing theory and the beginning of truth, beauty and value.
“We think the future of advertising is great products that have marketing embedded in them†(Jeff Hicks)
"There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products." (Cluetrain Manifesto)
"Really effective marketing will become ‘invisible’ " (Holy Cow)
"Many fundamental ideas are well conceived, but most need to be cut down to size, and separated from the reflexive propaganda of self promoting fads. Out of the rubble and out of the white noise, we can recognise the essence, then carefully select the grains of truth and rewrite a syntax to combine them back into meaningful discourse" (Uri)
Good-bye, Messages. Hello, Social Gesture. (Hugh)
"Stop obsessing about brands and witty taglines. Start obsessing about people, customers, users, consumers or whatever we want to call them that best fits our context. Become infatuated with meeting their wants, needs and desires". (David)
and finally (Richard):
Reading all these and more, you cannot escape a plain conclusion: Its the end of business school marketing and the beginning of value marketing or what you can simply described as be great or die. Now, how to be great? f**k knows…if I had the answer to that I’d be in the Bahamas now with a cocktail in my hand…
The spirit of the revolution is that its the end of formulaic marketing and the beginning of truth, beauty, essense and cause. It’s about finding the value (real, not just what you’d want it to ‘represent’ )or what is great about your brand and then finding the best way to communicate this to your consumers (embedded in the product? through events? your service? the package? your community? and yes, even your advertising? ). And If you cannot find whats really great about you, you’re screwed up anyway…
You cannot just take your cow and paint in purple!
As always a great post Asi. I completely agree that marketing is moving at such a speed of change that books of old cant keep up with it. If you think about it by the time someone writes a book. Then publishes it, then distributes it. Its out of date. The blogging world moves at such speed and can keep up.
I guess where my bug lies is. How do we convert all this to marketing people who read the books at Uni. They find it hard enough to sell marketing inhouse. Now how do we make them turn around and change this formulaic way of working, which they find save and easier to use to ask the finance guys for their budget next year.
Asi – superb post and high time someone wrote it. I have been thinking this for about 8 months now and getting increasingly frustrated by the sameness of it all. JG wrote about this in AfterImage, Earls wrote about it in Bananas, Business and the Death of Marketing – we have contributed little else since then really. I sincerely hope that it is the beginning of truth, beauty, essence and cause as you write – a wonderful sentiment if there ever was one. I think we are seeing true democracy at work here where you can have a stake in the cultural capital of the world you live in rather than being defined by your parents, the class system and the country you were born in. The old models are truly being broken and replaced almost by accident rather than design. Marketing is a relatively outdated concept in many ways – staffed by people who know less about it than the collective wisdom of the audience they are talking to. It is liberating and worrying at the same time. I like the fact that we have finally got the point: poor product performance will no longer be able to be disguised by clever marketing. WOM will see to that. The last bastion of the old school thinking of course is the fashion industry – entirely based on image and lacking any substance or real relevance. It will be interesting to see how people relate to clothes they cant afford or would want to wear modelled by illiterate footballers wives in say 5 years time. It is when the rules of copyright and ownership are really challenged that the game will be on to find the next best way of convincing large amounts of people to do/buy something they wouldnt normally do/buy. I am rather looking forward to it. Great blog Asi – keep it up. Peace.
Mark
I take your point from the point of view of someone who doesn’t work in marketing and doesn’t have much knowledge about it.
The problem that I see is that ‘the marketing of value’ seems to imply the notion of an objective value and moreover a general objective value (clear to everyone). I think this is rather problematic and it seems very similar to the old dilemma that economist still have about the notion of utility,
I think is very tricky to consider that an artifact (a product) has an objective general value. Affordances of an artifact are inherently multiple: differing perceptions lead to different use. And different perceptions lead to different value of it.
Maybe, I’ve not been very clear, hopefully you’ll see my point.
take care
G
Asi,
This is a great post. Yet I think it will take more time for reality to overcome marketing theory…. sadly. Though my blog has become a case study for “value marketing” (I provided value and the blog took off very rapidly) I still get the feeling that unless you’ve written a book, won more than a few industry awards and know the right people, you can only have so much impact.
On the bright side, change is underway and we live in remarkable times. Five years ago it would be nearly impossible for me to get on the radar of so many fellow professionals. That was reserved only for the “traditional” thought leaders. Today, a working class stiff like me can cultivate an audience, community and readership with the enablement of personal publishing.
The observers and theorists will still have the spotlight. They just may need to get used to sharing it a little with the practitioners.
Thank you guys for your kind words and insightful comments.
Mark:
)idea of the end of theory and the beginning of practice and experimentation.
“I like the fact that we have finally got the point: poor product performance will no longer be able to be disguised by clever marketing. WOM will see to that.”
As DA wrote, it all will take time. We practitioners can easily fall into the false consensus effect and to believe that our conduct and thinking is more impactful than it really is,(the masses still buy shitty products thats being marketed in shitty tactics) but its just the beginning and I really like the (theoretical
G.V:
We’ll keep on debating tomorrow at the LSE. My point was not about objective value but rather on the fact (or hope!) that in the near future poor product performance will no longer be able to be disguised by clever marketing, hence the idea of truth, beauty etc.
DA:
Great to have your voice over here, thanks. As you said, change is under way and good way to look for it is in your ripples effect. These are changing as well, and for the good, I believe.
Reading this post again, it looks rather confused. The points I was trying to make are:
1)Its the end of theory/formula and the beginning of practice and experimentation.
2) which naturally will force more authenticity, better quality and will kill off bad products and bad marketing.
2)traditional ‘thoughts leaders’ become less relevant – the most interesting/valuable knowledge can be found on communities blogversations.
I’m a bit late on this.
Sad to see very little has changed. Aren’t we all just blogging ‘m theory’ while waiting for ‘real’ briefs to get our teeth into?
Perhaps the only sensible (brave) thing to do is to develop our own products and services to both compete directly and share IP with our clients like Anomaly and the new hotshop agencies do.
I believe our hearts our in the right place but just we’re bored, bored, bored.