The Crisis in Marketing
This is a re-post of an earlier blog lost during the design transition. If you have not read it already, please enjoy it for the first time. If you have already read it, take another look – you might find something new.
What Pulp Fiction Tells Us About Marketing
John Travolta, playing Vincent, and Samuel L. Jackson, as Jules, dressed in casual black suits, are standing in an apartment arguing with a drug dealer about money he owes their boss, Marsellus Wallace. They are affable but serious cold-blooded assassins and errand boys for Marsellus, completely in control of the situation—they think. At the end of the scene, the dealer’s partner, nearly witless, bursts out of the apartment’s small bathroom and unloads an entire clip from his pistol at point-blank range. There’s a pause as Vincent and Jules consider their remarkably untouched state and the various holes in the apartment wall directly behind them. Then, at the same moment, they pull their own weapons from inside their jackets and blow the equally surprised drug dealer away. They don’t miss.
An unforgettable scene. An equally unforgettable lesson, if you happen to be engaged in a conflict of any kind, whether the weapons involved are semi-automatic pistols fired at short range or marketing campaigns fired with vastly greater expense at targets much, much farther away: Aim. If you are going to be effective in the day-to-day war of marketing, you would be well advised to learn how to aim, especially in times of crisis, whether economic or personal.
This book is about aiming. The weapons we address here are the staff you entrust with the responsibility for determining what you will say to your marketplace, where you will say it, and how creatively it will be communicated. They are your weapons of mass persuasion. Your ammunition is your budget and your target is your competition.
The cost of ignorance or lack of training in the simple task of aiming is vast. It outweighs all the budget you will ever spend on head-count on your staff or fees paid to your agencies. For resources aimed poorly waste every creative and media dollar. They waste every word of copy and every photo shoot. They waste every page of print and every photon of light from a PC or cell phone screen.
You cannot afford to aim your marketing poorly. As fast as you fire or as much ammunition as you unload, there is always a Vincent and a Jules. They are studied, they understand the principles involved, and they can take down all your marketing and branding efforts with a few well-aimed shots.
Our goal is to develop the science of aiming your marketing and communications efforts. This book is about how your audiences form perceptions of your brand. We will articulate the principles successful marketers have used mostly by instinct, but that you can with some study use thoughtfully to spend every dollar your company has entrusted to you more effectively.
Every business’s success depends on marketing its products. People can’t buy from you if they don’t know you exist. Businesses correspondingly spend billions of dollars each year on marketing. But the people involved in spending that money agree that most of it is wasted. To some extent, the problem is ineluctable. Most of the people you reach aren’t going to become your customers. John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” With the pace of media segmentation continuing to increase, Wanamaker may have underestimated. Marketing, and especially Advertising, is in a state of crisis
This is not news. What is news is the number of executives beginning to admit defeat. Those of us at industry conferences sit helpless as panels of experts fail to field questions from the audience. AdTech this year in San Francisco was perceived by many of us as a fiasco. Far too many speakers and panelists either could not or did not address the concerns of the attendees. Here’s our executive summary of the event:
Question: “What do we do about (insert issue here)?”
Chorus from the podium: “That’s really complicated.”
The problem is not evasion but confusion. No one understands how to formulate strategies in a marketplace being fragmented and transformed by technological advances that multiply options and generate indecipherable masses of information.
What is the first and most significant outcome of all this confusion? Billions of dollars of waste. The systemic effects of that waste include
- Constant churn of corporation and agency executives and agency relationships.
- More shot-in-the-dark campaigns and tactics created and killed.
- A crisis in confidence in marketing, from the board room to the back room.
- CEOs unsure of their marketing staff.
- A marketing staff that has become less sure of themselves and their agency partners.
Common solutions include stop and start efforts; endless and confusing briefs and re-briefs; changes in direction; and vast and sweeping budget changes, not simply due to the current economic crisis, but because markers are less certain than ever whether any given direction will work. Another increasingly common response is sending more people to meetings—and all of us know how well that works out. What does it add up to? Wasted time and wasted operating expense resulting in lower profit margins, less revenue, darkness, chaos, running, screaming, and blood in the streets. Okay, perhaps not that grim, but grim nonetheless for an industry once welcome in the board room and once in competition for the hearts and minds of the best and brightest young minds graduating from the top universities in the world.
A not inconsequential effect is the money we spend on fees paid to agencies. The staff doing the work suffers, but pushback is not encouraged for two reasons. Saying “no” to clients can get you fired. No one wants to be the one who convinces clients that someone else better understands their goals and needs. Besides, confusion and complexity on the client side equals more billable hours and revenue for agencies. Confusion generates work, and work generates income.
The results: Waste, waste, and more waste. More and more operating expense is wasted on agency hours to handle the increased workload, yielding often insane working conditions as the staff struggles to hang on, executing tactics under unreasonably mercurial conditions in our school-yard game of crack the whip.
Aimless Marketing
Ready, fire, ready, fire, ready, fire! If there is waste in marketing, it is reasonable to suggest that it begins with our aim: with our understanding of our target audience, what they want, and exactly what we should communicate to them to persuade them to believe in our positioning, adopt our point of view, love our brands, buy our products and services, and go on to convince their friends to do the same. We waste money on statements that are unnecessary or confusing. We waste money communicating claims and promises that are not relevant, do not make sense to our audience, or are seen by them to be a potpourri of disconnected messages that leave them without a discernible conclusion they can believe in.
Stop, just for a moment. Take the time to think deeply about what we have said and what we are about to say. Think very hard about the intersection of Communications as a discipline and Philosophy as it was originally conceived; philo, the love of, and sophia, wisdom. Look at our definitions and the model we construct from them and ask yourself whether this is not a better approach to marketing messaging than you, your company, or your industry currently uses.
A reasonable question to ask is, “Why should I believe thinking hard about this is worth my time and effort?” Here is one reason: We are offering you the first truly comprehensive framework for critical thinking and persuasion since the fall of the Roman Empire. In the ancient world, great thinkers such as Aristotle and Cicero devised models of persuasion—models the details of which have largely been forgotten. They did it for practical purposes. They wanted to win cases in court. They wanted to win votes in the Senate. They wanted to convince people that they were right. They wanted to get people to do things. They were marketers—public relations officers—advertisers—advocates. The models they built formed the foundation for educating people for a thousand years.
We propose to follow their example. What is the wise course in any time of turmoil? Think. It is far more difficult than it sounds, but our minds remain the single most laborsaving tool we possess. The war on waste, which is, in effect, the war for marketing effectiveness, begins with a reassessment of where we spend our precious mental resources. Money is always in short supply. What do we do when budgets get squeezed? The traditional answer is “cut something.” But as Ernest Rutherford, the Nobel-prize-winning New Zealand chemist who laid the groundwork for nuclear physics, famously said, “We haven’t got the money, so we have to think!” He later became an English Lord and then Baron. Lesson here? It pays to think.
Let’s ask the question: where can thinking get us? There are brilliant minds in our industry. They create brilliant campaigns, compelling communications plans, captivating creative. They write stunningly effective speeches, presentations, and press releases. They help Apple be Apple, Budweiser be the King of Beers, and Obama be Obama. And they are in short supply. As a wonderful woman in Austin said recently while awarding scholarships for C-students at a daughter’s high school, “very few of us are in the top 10 percent of the class. In fact seventy-five percent of us aren’t even in the top quarter!” How do we raise the bar for all of us whose profession is the art and science of persuasion?
-Casey C. Jones and Daniel Bonevac, Ph.D.
