Beware marketing truisms
by asi
I’m increasingly getting worried (and bored) about the rise and rise of new marketing truisms, especially in the context of the social web. There seems to be to many (or too little?) ‘It’s all about X’, with X being the marketing buzz word of the moment: social ideas, experience, marketing, engagement, conversation, twitter, bonfires etc… If you want to see HERD in action come look at my RSS feed.
All of these Xs are usually great (but not new) ideas, sometimes they are no more than empty memes but they can’t just be EVERYTHING.
It can’t be all just about X. It can’t be that simple. Actually it’s a quite natural quest to make the unfamiliar, familiar. We human feel very uncomfortable in the face uncertainty – we are not wired to embrace uncertainty but rather to always strive to make sense of the world.
But the only truth that stands the test of reality today is that there is no one truth. It’s all just too messy, unpredictable, sophisticated and changing way too quickly for anything to become marketing dogmatism.
Case in point – the recent Guinness TV ad that immediately got the experts singing “where is the conversation”? Does everything have to be about ‘the conversation’? I’m not sure. What’s wrong with old school epic production that resonates with people on a very personal level (who doesn’t want to be God every now and then?) and that leaves effective mark on our psychic for the next time we’re in a pub? Surely reality is more complex than the conversation(?)
Only when we realise how truly fluid and dynamic and out of control reality is we will be able to come up with great strategies and creative ideas. Dogmatism and fundamentalism suck in any context, definitely in business and marketing.
I’m completely with you.
Sadly, wrong-but-simple is more ‘buyable’ than right-but-complex.
noone ever got famous in advertising for saying “the world is broadly the same as it was before, but now, in certain cases, x may be more important than it was z years ago…”
For all that the world is changing, and changing quickly, I do think the Stalinist tendancy within the digital/social media world do themselves a diservice with their fundementalist adherence to the ‘one way’ of doing things.
Just do something great that meets the objectives set for it, whatever that might be.
Easy innit!