Driving me round the trend ...

 

My trend-weariness was setting in already over three years ago, I see. This year, I’ve even looked at some of the AI summaries of trend reports and, maybe predictably, haven’t seen much to inspire me. It really does seem to be a load of (crystal) balls.

A new-ish genre in the trend oeuvre - in addition to category trends, consumer trends, media trends, tech trends et al - is marketing trends aka The Future of Marketing. One such is the Cap Gemini report I commented on a few weeks back.

Another is McKinsey’s State of Marketing Europe 2026.  In case you’re wondering how McKinsey work out the future of marketing in Europe, they do it by looking in the rearview mirror. Via a survey of 500 senior marketing decision-makers across 5 countries, backed up with a few depth interveiws with CMOs and academics. 

The stunning conclusion is that “marketing leaders are returning to mastering the basics but simultaneously advancing with utilizing modern tools.” Gosh. 

To get on in 2026, marketers must: Be Trusted, Be Effective, Be Bold. As opposed to ...

Golly gosh indeed. Who’d have thought it? 

There’s a rather hectoring tone about the report - in reference to AI: “Unless European marketing leaders rapidly change their attitudes ...”

Yes, tut, tut. Watch out before the cruel VUCA world gobbles you up, or the Burning Platform turns into an inferno.

The 50-page report has no less than 10 named authors (which doesn’t include Claude or ChatGPT), plus a list of industry experts as long as your arm, plus numerous McKinsey experts and colleagues. Not to mention all the others named who offered “editorial support."

There’s something “too many cooks” about this. It’s a report on an opinion poll, where the questionnaire has been designed by McKinsey. The 500 senior marketing decision-makers, I’m sure, work on a fascinating and diverse range of brands. And are, most likely, a varied bunch with some marked differences in character, in experience - and I’m sure in the way they approach marketing. 

Yet they’ve all been reduced to data points to make generalisations of the LCD sort, rather than HCF. Standardised to fit McKinsey’s frameworks, questions, flywheels, playbooks, agenda and whatever else.

The result is a rather bland, self-fulfilling prophecy. Seek and ye will find.

This stuff is all bad enough, as far as I'm concerned, when McKinsey does it.

But where McKinsey sucks, so do many lesser mortals, out to make a quick buck.

The author/s of this “Industry Pulse Report" report will remain nameless. The industry in question is digital media and advertising. 220 UK digital media experts were questioned in the survey that forms the basis of this - ahem - sales pitch.

But just look at this one chart:

The “experts” were asked what was suitable content to be adjacent to their brand. 

Around a quarter of these experts think it’s not just OK but positively “suitable” for your brand to be next to content that contains inaccurate information, mis/disinformation, or hallucinations. Or content that provides an ad-spammy or cluttered user experience. 

With the rise of synthetic respondents, I am beginning to wonder about the “experts” who find time to take part in these surveys. 

And the brands played on

 

ideo.com

It all started at the end of summer. It must have been this story that sowed the seed - the much-shared latter-day Cautionary Tale of Nike. Massimo Giunco posted Nike: An Epic Saga of Value Destruction - I echoed the thoughts of many, muddled in with my own ...

 

Sacrifice human relationships, specialist knowledge, experience, informed judgement and insight - from employees to suppliers to customers to shoppers - on the altar of "data-driven”. This is a sad tale, brilliantly written (“a cannibal ecosytem”, “... less effective but easier to be measured vs. something that was more effective but less easy to be measured ...”). But not without hope that one of the greatest brands of our time can survive this self-inflicted malady

Hot on Nike’s heels, this came along - an article by Anders Indset on the theme of Marketing is dead - long live Marketing! The author starts by reflecting back to the glory days of German ad agencies in the early 2000s (a nice little nostalgia trip for me). And then, how brands faded into the background as years of CpCs, click-marketing, Customer Journeys and search optimisation took over. But, he concludes: The world of platforms and click-optimisation has reached its logical endpoint. When everyone’s on the stage, no-one watches any more.

 

So, what now, in the age of ChatGPT and LLMs? Anders hails a return to the good old marketing of Kotler and Aaker - investing in brands, the 4Ps, good ideas. I’m definitely all for this, and will even forgive Anders his rather bizarre inclusion of the “American” Kevin Roberts and his Lovemarks amongst the marketing and advertising greats.

 

The next thoughts that flitted into my consciousness were those of Paul Worthington of invencion, on Quantitative Destruction and The Efficiency Delusion. In these articles, he writes of “quantitative myopia” - a dangerous and arrogant myopia that ignores complex reality while focusing intently on a simplistic, quantitatively measureable model, which they believe represents everything that matters.

 

The “they” in all this, the quantitative myopics, are the executives rising to the top of companies. Nike is one example. Starbucks is another losing value in its aim to become a closed-system, “category of one”, where it doesn’t matter if customers have a rotten experience as they have no choice.

 

Meanwhile, all this is exacerbated by marketing budget cuts and “having to do more with less.” Anything to do with the customer - marketing, experience, branding - is now on a very thin shoestring.

 

All of this is opinion, of course. So I’ll bring in some data. I'm not against data. But it doesn’t drive me. Or even inform me - only humans do that. The 2024 McKinsey report on the state of Marketing in Germany is called Back to the Future. What are the big topics close to the hearts of Germany’s marketers in 2024? AI? Marketing ROI? Yes, these are important, but they don’t make the top three most important. And these represent a return to the core competencies of marketing:

1. Creative content - a renaissance of originality

2. Brand-building

3. Authenticity - in word and deed.

 

The evidence reels in thick and fast - the brands are back in town. System1 have recently demonstrated how creative consistency (which doesn’t mean matching luggage, by the way) leads to creative quality, stronger brands and greater profits.

 

Which brings me right up-to-date with Interbrand and The Best Global Brands 2024, celebrating its 25th anniversary. There’s plenty to celebrate, but also a warning or two: performance marketing tactics can drive short-term financial gains, but an increasingly short-term mindset has cost the world’s most valuable brands significantly.

 

Interbrand’s advice is good - look behind the clever-cleverness of this phrase: the fastest-growing companies are not branding their businesses - they’re businessing their brand.

 

So, there we are. Branding being back in business is in the air. I expect the quantitative myopics would explain all this through a mixture of the algorithm, the Extrawurst echo chamber and she-would-say-that-wouldn’t-she. 

 

But I prefer to put it down to synchronicity.

The proper way to the beach

 

I was taught the planning cycle at a relatively early age - not quite as early as my times tables, but I had it drummed into me in a similar way. 

Where are we now? (With our brand or business)

Where do we want to be?

How do we get there?

Are we getting there?

I have the feeling that because the whole area of marketing has exploded into so many specialisms, t the focus has slipped right onto “how do we get there” in its intricate detail of touchpoints, new tech, personas and all the rest without any consideration of where we’re going with this and why.

I recently had a brief that went along the lines of - we have to develop an app that’s going to do x, y & z - without any thought given to why, or even who this app might be for.

I’ve seen this wonderful picture recently from The Proper Marketing Club (Matt Dillon) , which gently reminds marketers of the starting point if you want to be the brightest brand on the beach.

Even if your business can’t afford stacks of ad-hoc quantitative surveys, desk research on markets and trends plus a couple of questions on an omnibus and a few intelligently-conducted stakeholder interviews are always a good start.

 

Why can't we live together?

At the end of 2019, I blogged about reconciliation, in the hope that 2020 might be the year, both on the political front and in the world of marketing, that we might be able to reconcile differences, establish common ground and move forward on this basis.

Unfortunately, the common ground that came upon us was something we hadn't wished for - a rather nasty and persistent virus.  The first couple of months did see some pulling together against adversity, which I think gave me renewed hope in humanity and what we can achieve if we work with what can unite us and leave divisiveness behind.

But unfortunately, the old divisions have crept back and new ones have come to the fore. And yes, I do believe that without differences and a certain amount of friction and tension, there's no progression, but in the world at large as well as the microcosm of marketing, there still seems to be a lot of black and white thinking going on.

Binary debates in marketing Source: Martin Weigel

Rather than aligning myself to one camp or another, I've learned along the way that the truth about these things usually involves "a bit of both", whether its human and machine, purpose and profit or brand-building and activation.

There a super article from Tom Roach here, which looks at the false choice between long- and short-term marketing or brand/performance. The approach is to harmonise short-term sales and long-term growth, with "share of search" as a promising metric to predict market share that both camps (if we really have to have these camps) can get behind. Thus selling "both immediately and forever" as Jeremy Bullmore put it.

Mark Ritson has summed all of this up rather well in his article about "Bothism" - the rare capacity to not only see the value of both sides of the the marketing story, but actively consider and then co-opt them into any subsequent marketing endeavour in an appropriate way.

And yes, I do have The Beatles and The Stones, Oasis and Blur in my music collection. As well as a lot of other weirder stuff, which is another story.

Those less fortunate

About a week ago (I have lost track of time in this weird pandemic pandemonium), in the light of supermarket shortages, the photo above went viral on social media. Comments focus on how "heartbreaking" it was, with plenty of weeping emojis and self-righteous indignation about the lack of brain cells of the loo-roll hoarders and their like.

I can imagine that most of these comments saw a tragic scene of a "poor elderly (anonymous) gentleman", sadly bowing his head in silent submission of his fate. The reality, I read later, was a little different. Anthony Glynn, a retired merchant seaman aged 79, had gone out shopping on behalf of his elderly neighbours and had forgotten his reading glasses so was squinting at his shopping list.

This reminds me of my parents, who, in their retirement helped out with "the old people" - in fact, in her 90s, my mum was still doing voluntary work for Age Concern, visiting older people who were housebound. Some of these were a good few years younger than her, of course.

In real life and in marketing (which shouldn't actually be different, but they are), there is an increasing tendency to cast everyone as a victim, to describe huge swathes of the population as generally "vulnerable" - without really saying to what in particular. And yes, human beings are vulnerable - to the COVID-19 virus for example.

But you can be resilient, courageous, even, as well as vulnerable. Society is not simply divided into "heroes and the vulnerable" or (in pre-corona days) into "the toxic and the victims". I found this article by sociologist Frank Furedi particularly illuminating on the current crisis. He calls for a cultivation of courage, and its attendant qualities of altruism, responsibility and wisdom.

Courage is not the same as fearlessness. You can't have courage without fear.

I do hope that one (admittedly not terribly high on the world priority list) consequence of the current crisis is that we'll see all those ridiculous "empowerment" campaigns for the nonsense and home-grown problem:solution guff that they are.

Comic consultancy

I sometimes wonder if people in the marketing and advertising business have as much fun as they did years ago. It does all seem to have become terribly serious and worthy, with the only source of amusement Tom Fishburne's excellent cartoons.

But every now and then I see something that I wish I'd done. This time, it's Waccenture, a parody of all those smart-arse consultancies:

Turning the obvious into insights, customers into data-points and creativity into algorithms.

From the ghastly stock pictures, to ample use of placeholder text, to clickbait "insight article" headlines quoting phoney research, to the "6-D Process", it's just a little too close for comfort.

Through a glass darkly

The theme to Interbrand's Best Global Brands 2018 is "Activating Brave", which is another variation on the theme of "long-term agility" - the acknowledged approach for brand growth in the 21st century.

In this article, Daniel Binns from Interbrand explains a little more about how the best brands grow:

“What are these brands doing to achieve success? They are harnessing the ability to take bold short-term action in pursuit of a clear and aligned long-term vision. The key to Activating Brave is to simultaneously look through a microscope and a telescope, and have the courage to intercept the future, not just flow with it,”

I like the idea of the simultaneous microscope and telescope - but does it miss something? Or, rather, are we in danger of missing something if we are forever looking through this lens or another - the customers lens, the consumer lens, the competitor lens. In marketing workshops these days, there seem to be more lenses than at Specsavers!

How would it be if we also used those perfectly good lenses behind the aqueous humour and looked at how brands exist out there in the real world, too?

As the Good Book says (1 Corinthians Chapter 13, v12): 
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 

For what it's worth

I recently visited the Strathisla Whisky Distillery, of Chivas Regal fame, and as well as having a thoroughly enjoyable time, I was reminded of two fundamental truths in Marketing:

- seeing, hearing, experiencing how food and drink is crafted can all add further enjoyment to the consumption of  that food or drink
- knowing the story behind a product or brand can add greatly to its perceived value

These truths are known by most marketers intuitively, and we can all back up our assertions with any number of examples or personal experiences.

I was interested to find a 'literary and anthropological experiment' which has sought to value the effect of storytelling on the value of objects. The experiment was started around 10 years ago, and is called Significant Objects. The experiment - which has taken on a life beyond the initial round - was conceived by journalist and author Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, who conclude that: Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object's subjective value can actually be measured objectively.

What the experimenters did was to buy a load of jumble-sale bric-a-brac, then give a number of writers a piece to write a short story or flash fiction about. The objects were then put on ebay, together with the accompanying story.

You can see the objects on the website, divided into 'significant' categories - Fossils, Talismans, Idols, Totems, Evidence. There's all manner of tat, from a Charlie's Angels thermos to a lighter in the shape of a pool ball. And the stories range from 6 words to minor epics.

In the first round of the experiment, the experimenters sold items that had cost $128 for $3612.

Now, I know you can pick holes in this. The stories were fiction, and were clearly marked as such. Would true stories about the objects, well-written have had the same effect? Did the well-known status of some of the authors have an influence? Was there knowledge that the proceeds would be going to charity? Was there a word-of-mouth element amongst the experimenters' literary and journalistic friends and contacts?

Still, you have to admire a writer who can raise the value of a 'mystery object' from 99c right up to $103.50.

It is Christmas Day in the Workshop

If I could pick what has been the biggest change in the way marketing and advertising people work over the last twenty-five years or so, I'd have to say that it's the rampant rise of the workshop. Since I've been freelance, the majority of requests that come in are for designing and running workshops.

I looked at my trusty Oxford Dictionary (published in the 1980s), and at this point, the main definition of 'Workshop' referred to 'a room or building in which manufacture is carried out'. Maybe that's why I have always associated the word with the grim connotations of 'Workhouse'. There's a secondary definition, which does suggest a 'meeting of several persons for intensive discussions, seminars, learning' but the emphasis here is on something extra, for educational purposes.

These days, workshops seem ubiquitous. I have even heard 'workshop' used as a verb - 'let's workshop it.' What did we do before workshops? Well, we did have plenty of brainstorms, but I notice these have gone rather out of favour. The post-its, the flip charts, the marker pens are now the weapons of choice of the workshop facilitator.

With colleagues working on a project often dispersed geographically, one reason that workshops have gained popularity must be the need to use the limited time that people are together, face to face, wisely and effectively. There's a worry that a free-flowing discussion, or a simple meeting won't be productive, therefore the need for more planning and structure.

While this makes sense in a lot of cases, and a well-conceived, designed and run workshop should yield results, I'm sure we've all experienced so-called workshops that have over-run, gone off on another tangent, provided reams of indecipherable post-its, or have simply confirmed one or two lowest common denominators, aka 'alignment'.

Often these workshops are ineffective and focus on consensus rather than brilliance due to a lack of clarity at the outset of what the purpose is. For me, brainstorms are about ideas, while workshops are about specific solutions to specific questions. It's a bit like qualitative and quantitative research.

Before we go into automatic pilot and 'workshop it' - we should ask ourselves: what is 'it'? What is the question we want to find a solution to? Is a workshop the best way of doing this?

Or should we have a brainstorming session, or simply a good old-fashioned meeting?

Advertising - what is it good for?

I've never been to Cannes, mainly because in my advertising agency heyday back in the last century, it just wasn't the done thing for planners to go along to this sort of jamboree. It was a rare account person that got to go, come to think of it. Of course, things are different now. There are all sorts of geeks there now from clients to planners of various persuasions to all kinds of techy people. I'm not even sure if creatives still attend.

In the aftermath of Cannes, there has been a spate of articles bemoaning the state of the industry, questioning what exactly Cannes is celebrating and asking the question - who is advertising actually for these days? Here are some that caught my eye:

Tracey Follows, in the The Guardian asks When will advertising ever again be about the people it serves? It's a thought-provoking piece, slightly let down by the ghastly c-word (you know what I mean) when talking about people, about how advertisers' obsession with technology has meant a trade-off in humanity.

Sean Boyle, of BrainJuicer argues that those creating advertising have become over-thinkers, too tricksy, too enamoured of technology and technique - 'how much time we spend nervously over-thinking what never, ever needed to become this difficult.' His simple solution: Aim for Fame.

Keith Weed's speech from Cannes is also worth a look. He's the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Unilever. His argument is that we've moved from Marketing To People (broadcasting to a captive audience) to Marketing With People (curating and creating with an audience) and we should move to Marketing For People (connecting purpose with purchase).

I'm not sure I buy that. Surely marketing was always about people - finding out what moves and motivates them, developing products and services that meet their needs and desires, and communicating these in a compelling way. And I think the image of the captive audience is a myth. We had remote controls to flick through channels back in the last century - and there were some great ads around that you didn't want to fast forward, in the UK at any rate. Maybe he means 'captivated audience'?!

That little disagreement aside, I like what he's saying - purpose and purchase, engaging people's hearts, not about technology but ideas, yes, yes, tick, tick.

The final link is also to the Guardian, a piece by Tom Goodwin from Havas, who argues that advertising is 'an industry that's in love with technology and itself, not the people it purports to sell to.' Now, while it's a great article, I think there's the same slight problem with vocabulary. Yes, you sell to people. But have we ever marketed to them? I'll leave you with a great quote form the article:

I’ve never met anyone who has seen a vending machine reward them for laughing, I’ve never walked through a door marked ugly, got a Coke from a drone, or been offered a crisp packet with my face on. I’ve never had a friend share their personalised film, I’ve not seen outdoor ads that are also street furniture or had an ATM give me a funny receipt. I’ve not received a magazine with a near field communication thing and I’ve not had a virtual reality experience outside advertising conferences. I’ve not once seen a member of the public 3D print anything. The one thing that binds together the more than 200 Cannes winners I’ve seen, is that they are ads only advertising people have a good chance of seeing. I’m not sure that’s what the industry should be about.

Marketing with mother

I have written from time to time here about the futility of "marketing to the over 50s". A similarly futile exercise, as I see it, is "marketing to mums." I don't know if anyone else felt vaguely uneasy about the much feted P&G campaign a few years back, around the time of the Olympics: Proud Sponsor of Mums. My uneasiness came from a number of angles - first, the obvious, what about Dads? There was also the manipulative, cheesy tonality of the films. But the uneasiness also came from knowing the agenda at P&G, a company whose main brands are household and baby care products. I even worked on Pampers for a few years and I hate to say this, but there were precious few mums around, on either the client or the agency side. More of that later.

There's a article entitled Marketing to mums is broken in Marketing magazine which touches on this issue. It's written by a woman, who is a mother herself, Nicola Kemp. But, curiously, even in this article, three of the six people who are quoted are men, and it's not clear how many of the women are mothers. Now, I know you don't have to belong to a target group in order to market to that group, but the bias in advertising agencies against mothers still seems to be extreme. Of the three women quoted, one of them said this: There aren't enough female creatives and there aren't enough creatives that are mums. If we changed this, we would do a better job.

The woman who said this is Roisin Donnelly, of P&G. So that, at least, gives me hope.

Cuspidors and Catamenials

I've just read an amusing article from The Economist about euphemisms in marketing. It's about those products that most of the human race need at some time or another but we don't like referring to them - or the problem they solve - in polite company, or seeing lurid demos of the product's efficacy on our TV screens while we're eating.

I've never worked on the SanPro market (as we referred to it in the UK, aka 'feminine hygiene') but I have noticed that there's a bit of a movement away from the cliches in recent advertising, to the "heavily emotional and empowering" or to the "blunt and outrageous." But in other areas, twee euphemism still reigns. Nappies/diapers for school age children are called "sleepovers" or "pyjama pants."

I wonder, with the increasing number and purchase power of over 60s, whether we'll see a surge in acceptability of products and brands that were previously bought in plain brown wrappers or, at any rate, as discretely as possible, from constipation remedies to denture cleaners to incontinence pads.

Talking of which, I do remember being amused by P&G explaining that their collective term for SanPro and Adult Incontinence products was Catamenials. And, better still, my cabin crew friends at British Airways were told to refer to sick bags as Cuspidors.

Cuspidors and Catamenials. It sounds almost Shakespearian!

Ranting about Ratings

Tearing opening an amazon package in the rush to get my presents all packed up in time, I noticed a request to "rate this packaging", directing me to both the UK and German amazon sites. Just out of interest, I typed in the link and left some ratings as to the size, adequacy and ease of opening of the packaging.

It's not just amazon who bother you for ratings - of the item itself, the seller, the packaging. All around airports, stations and other public places, neon smilies await your rating of the "toilet experience" or similar. I don't usually bother as these rarely allow you to clarify, justify or explain your rating - which can't be very helpful if a problem arises.

I can take all this rating business as long as it's about practical, factual stuff. Difficult packaging or dirty toilets are much the same to all of us. But once we get into the area of personal opinion, it gets difficult. I have written reviews on amazon for years, for books mostly, and I still feel uneasy about giving out stars. Quite frankly, I'd much rather just write a review of the book. But the trend is going such that the stars and ratings and averages are becoming far more important than what people actually think or feel.

It's the same in marketing. There is a growing tendency for KPIs to become goals or objectives in themselves. It becomes more important to achieve a certain score on some numerical indicator than to work out what we want to do with our brand. "Make our brand famous" is, for me, a valid objective. How you measure that, if you can, is another question.

I see too much application of positivism in marketing, with the misconception that what can be measured must be important and what can't, isn't.

There was only one star that the wise men followed that first Christmas, but it was a good one.

Build me a Bridge

It seems to be OK, even admirable these days to say you were useless at maths at school. Well, I wasn't. I was good at maths, although I couldn't add up without counting on my fingers or scribbling on paper so maybe my mental arithmetic wasn't so hot. But when it came to algebra and that sort of thing, my strategy was always to go back to first principles - what are we trying to do here?

It's worth doing the same these days in my job, as marketing communications becomes an ever more complex field. I do sometimes need to remind myself about what strategy is all about. It's about being in one place, and wanting to get to another place, then building the bridge (the strategy) to get you there.

With brand communications, those places involve people. What are people thinking, feeling and doing in relation to your brand and the market it's in at the moment? What would you like them to think, feel and do in your future - that your brand communication could potentially influence?

I sometimes get myself in a tangle, still, when thinking about objectives. "Communicate that our brand delivers XYZ benefit better than any other" isn't a communication objective, it's a message or bit of content. But what change in people's perceptions or behaviour do we want to see? That is a communication objective. Whether we can measure it such that it becomes a numerical goal is another question.

Business objectives are usually couched in the language of profit or growth. Marketing Objectives may include brand/market share, or % penetration. And these objectives need all elements of the marketing mix (4, 5, or 6 Ps depending on how you see it).

But communications objectives must relate back to something people will think, feel or do. Make the brand more famous than Victoria Beckham. Sign up a friend for the customer club. Give them a sense of self-esteem. Cry. Say yes. Say no. Dig their hand in their pocket and contribute.

And the more it's about doing, the better.

My brand, right or wrong!

Every now and then, I come across a presentation or a blog post that's a refreshing antidote to the usual marketing and advertising hubris blah-blah where toilet cleaner brands are regularly raised to the status of demi-gods.

This time it's a presentation from Martin Weigel of Wieden & Kennedy entitled How to (not) Fail, and he's blogged about it in a post entitled A tale of humility and indifference.

Well worth reading to take you down to earth, Martin stresses the over reliance of marketeers on metaphor and specifically that metaphor of relationships with brands reflecting human relationships. And when he's taken you down to earth, he inspires you again by showing exactly how important stunning creativity is to overcome indifference.

One of the words in the marketing vocabulary that most gets my goat is one of the older ones: loyalty. The use of this word in describing the relationship between a person and a brand (or even a company) has always made me queasy. Loyalty is defined, usually, as "true, faithful to duty, love or obligation (to a person)" or possibly "faithful in allegiance to sovereign, mother country".

Now, one of the reasons that all that "King and Country" stuff has gone out of the window in the last century is that people have realised that you don't get much back for your investment of your love, duty or even life. And it's the same with brands. They cannot return or reward this "faithfulness" except with a  few Airmiles or a 25% discount when you've collected twenty five stickers on that annoying card cluttering up your wallet with zillions of others.

I've heard marketers getting quite huffy when talking about their "unloyal (sic) customers", as if they'd committed some ghastly act of betrayal. But seriously, what are you going to do if your customers decide to try another brand? Shoot them? Track down their new flame and peel its brand onion with a rusty knife?

At the end of it, "your" customers are usually someone else's, too.

A gloriously broad beacon

I've learned a couple of new words today, thanks to a thought-provoking article in Contagious, by John V Willshire of Smithery.

If you work in marketing, you spend countless hours discussing two things:
1. What is a brand, anyway?
2. What does our brand stand for?

John V Willshire quotes Richard Sennett's Together in defining two types of conversation - the Dialectic, which is all about aligning people around a mutually agreed resolution, a consensus if you like, to move forward from there - and the Dialogic, which is about exchanging views without forcing them together, and moving forward choosing the view or idea that seems best in the circumstances.

Brand Management has traditionally been about the dialectic - reduction, compression, or distillation of a brand's components and essence into some kind of rigid model - a key, an onion, a pyramid or even a one-word equity.

But, questions the author, is this the best way in the internet age? Is this kind of thinking redundant? Should we not be happy to live with the indefinability of a "gloriously broad brand"?

It's worth pondering. But my feeling is that the world was always complex, internet or no internet, and it will continue to be so. People will always look for lighthouses and beacons for orientation, safety, ease, reassurance - which is the role of brands.

No-one but the most naive junior junior brand manager seriously thinks that a brand onion is real. The map is not the territory. Maybe we can improve on our cartography but we can't change the territory, only the way we represent it.

A gloriously broad beacon?

Another (New) Marketing Manifesto

Manifestos became all the rage in marketing circles about fifteen years ago, I think. Suddenly it wasn't sufficient to have a plan or a strategy for your brand - a manifesto was needed. A manifesto has all the associations of action, of getting things done, of motivating, of not over-theorising and getting caught up in intellectual knots.

John Grant's excellent book, 'The New Marketing Manifesto' was launched in 1999. It caught a lot of the new spirit of marketing and is still valid today.

The Marketing Society in the UK have recently launched another (new) Marketing Manifesto which sets out how marketing generally can continue to contribute powerfully to society over the next decade.

I've had a look at it, and it makes a lot of sense, although I feel it could be bolder and more revolutionary still.

The new Manifesto defines the purpose of marketing: "To create sustainable growth by understanding, anticipating and satisfying customer needs."

I like the move away from (just) profit. But I wonder - is the term "sustainable growth" a bit of a weasel? It implies a lot, but what does it really mean? And - is growth assumed to be measured in terms of sales value? Or some other kind of growth?

I'm happy to see that the word "consumer" doesn't feature. But is "customer" so much better? And "needs"? Are dreams and desires part of that?

The Manifesto sets out three challenges:

Pursue your Purpose
- define your organisation's purpose
- make sustainable growth your central aim
- leave a positive legacy

Champion Customers
- anticipate customer needs
- shape the customer experience
- find creative ways to engage

Mobilise the Organisation
- collaborate with your peers
- bring the voice of the customer into the boardroom
- quantify the cost and value of your work

It's good, as far as it goes, but I do wonder if it's a bit "business as usual."

Maybe the problem is that Manifestos themselves have become a little old hat. They've lost their power.

Is the challenge now to find a new metaphor?