Let’s be honest -- marketing as most of us know it no longer exists.
There are several reasons for this and many of them lie at the feet of marketers themselves: poorly conceived campaigns, slow delivery of the creative, the attitude that we are ‘ar-teests,’ the derivative nature of most of our work these past two decades and agency billing procedures that are a micrometer short of highway robbery.
Marketers have been replaced by IT and software guys who have redefined our art/craft so that they can claim to be marketing experts. They define the job so they are the job. And that job is numbers, numbers, numbers.
Better still, here’s the new marketing task in a nutshell:
Trick consumers into seeing ads for products they don’t want and don’t believe in.
Sure, larger, more sophisticated companies still understand the need for marketing in the sense of defining a market, positioning a product and telling an emotional narrative that drives sales. Please look at the Samsung Galaxy III spot… the story it tells, the images it uses and how it’s positioned Samsung as superior to the iPhone. That’s marketing.
But most medium to smaller companies have been convinced by the plethora of Internet/SEO/automated sales people that they have no need for this type of marketing and storytelling. Instead they willingly spend on software and analytics and email lists and multiple landing pages. Numbers, numbers, metric, metrics.
Here’s the cool part: the metrics are meaningless. They were created by digital guys to match the capabilities of the software. It’s a shell game: we measure those measurements that we can measure. Catch-22 if there ever was one.
Do these metrics equate to sales or profits? Rarely, if ever. But by God they can show their clients digitally-generated numbers, so they must be true.
They toss a bone to ‘content,’ but don’t care, really. Had Google not mentioned that new algorithms would be driven by content, these Net people wouldn’t give marketing narratives the time of day.
You know that old line about ‘sell the sizzle not the steak’? These guys sell neither.
Again, they have one goal: To trick consumers into seeing ads for products that consumers don’t want and don’t believe in.
That’s Marketing 101 in 2013. Live with it.
Amazingly, these guys preach the need for a personalized message but then send unwanted and totally impersonal junk to any name they can get their hands on. Personalized? They can’t spell it.
Now here’s the real Catch-22. Because these automated mavens have the numbers and count the numbers, they never fail.(Remember what Stalin said about elections? He didn’t care who voted as long as he got to count the votes.) If a product doesn’t sell it’s because of a weak story -- fire the $20 an hour copywriter. But, if the product does sell, it’s all in the software and programming.
And gullible CEOs are lining up for the privilege.
Did I just read that 83% of company execs think that marketing has ZERO effect on sales and/or profits? Ask these same men and women about the value of automated, integrated, digital, analytic programs and they’ll virtually wet their pants with glee.
At a time when smart marketing is desperately needed, it’s been co-opted, vilified, scorned and ignored in favor of software, metrics and meaningless numbers.
“Consumers want a new story... authenticity, not spin... participation, not propaganda.”
