The safety net

There's something I've been thinking about since last month's planning conference.

We've all been talking for some time now about how traditional marketing thinking - fixed, linear, reductive, rational, word-based, brand-centric and so on - isn't working anymore.  It's not descriptive of the real world, and limits our ability to build effective brands.

We've also all been talking about new ways of working - acceptance that both brands and markets are complex and constantly in flux, importance of collective behaviour, the need to experiment more - that seem to work a lot better. They're more descriptive of the real world, and more helpful to building effective brands.

Over the past couple of years there's been lots of smart discussion about these points. And yet the marketing world isn't exactly flocking to change its models and ways of doing business. So why is it proving so hard to change? I'm sure much of it comes from the natural human tendencies towards habit and resistance to change until something breaks completely.

But at its core, I think the problem comes down to this: the old model may be wrong, but it provides a powerful sense of control, predictability and safety. By contrast, when we talk about complexity and nuance and flux, it sounds uncontrollable, unpredictable and terrifying.

The thing is, we need to accept that control & safety are illusions that are really attractive and hard to shake. I don't fault anyone for wanting safety - it's a core human driver in any situation, but especially given the stakes in business. If you're charged with spending millions of dollars of your company's money, of course you want to be able to control and predict what happens. Of course you want to feel safe and reassured.

It's not really surprising that most people would rather have a faulty prediction than an accurate picture of an unpredictable world. Things like brand onions and creative pre-testing may not reflect reality very much, but if they make you feel safer and let you avoid blame for failure then heck, why not?

The illusion of control is particularly hard to challenge because it's rarely called into question later. It's often really hard to tell what's actually happening in the marketplace, so when what was predicted would happen doesn't happen (an ad that pre-tested well does poorly in market, for example), it's easy to blame one of the myriad external factors (competitive activity, poor support from the sales team) rather than question if the assumptions leading to the prediction were wrong. Ironically, the complexity of brands and marketing is probably keeping the simplistic assumptions and models in place.

All of this reminds me a bit of Russell's line (from William Gibson's definition of cyberspace) that a brand is a "consensual hallucination."  The traditional marketing assumptions could also be described as consensual hallucinations.  Everybody kind of knows they're wrong but they're useful and convenient so they persist as "something illusory that only exists because sufficient numbers of people are willing to pretend that it's real."

So how do we get past that?

For marketing to move forward, I don't think demonstrating that the traditional models are wrong is enough. I think we need to change the conventional wisdom that they're safe.

We need to create compelling arguments for two things:

1. That the control & predictability offered by traditional marketing assumptions is illusory and actually unsafe.
2. That the world of complexity is actually safer and more manageable than it seems.

Over the next few posts I'm going to take a stab at some ways to do that.

Comments

[The Ad Contrarian]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Where is the evidence that the traditional
principles of marketing -- "linear... rational... brand-centric" aren't working anymore? They seem to be working pretty damn well for Toyota and Apple.

[Jason Oke]

Hi - Thanks for the challenge.

First, I'd say the evidence is all around you. The vast majority of advertising (most of it created using traditional marketing assumptions) simply doesn't work, and the most brands are perceived as becoming increasingly similar. Gareth has a good summary of the many ways that advertising is currently not delivering results here:
http://garethkay.typepad.com/brand_new/2007/08/is-planning-bro.html

And I can't speak for Toyota, but having worked on Apple at TBWA surely it's a stretch to attribute Apple's success to "linear & rational" brand building principles. Apple is a pretty multi-faceted and complex brand, no?

[Angus]

Nice Jason.

[Leland M]

In response to The Ad Contrarian's post...

Tiger Woods, by many measures had the perfect swing. The proof was irrefutable: winning major after major at such a young age and by such a large margin.

Yet, in early 2005, sitting atop the golf community, he changed his swing.

Why change something that's working? What's the point? Evidence told him he was doing great.

He changed because he thought he could do better.

Complacency is an early warning sign of future failure.

We too can do better.

[Daremoshirinai]

A man of my own heart. Gibson appropriated that line from a social scientist (anthropologist I think) whom said "Society is a consensual hallucination". Still, I hope this line of thinking catches on in a big way soon, but I guess unless you work your neurons constantly the patterns harden with age.....

[The Ad Contrarian]

I see a lot of assertions but no evidence. Do you mean to tell me that the billions of dollars advertisers are spending are all being wasted? Then why are they doing it?

Of course Apple is a "multi-faceted... complex brand" but they operate under certain clear principles of marketing. They always focus their ads on the product. The iPhone introduction was a 30 second product demo. Not a gorilla banging on drums.

The tortured logic of planning has resulted in too much smug, benefit-free advertising for generic, undifferentiated brands.

[James]

Jason: great, brave post. Well done, you mild-manner Canuck!

Sorry.

So, why no change?

I wrote the following in response to Scott Karp's post, Who's Afraid of Online Advertising: http://publishing2.com/2007/09/19/whos-afraid-of-online-advertising

Point 1: people, alone and in groups, make decisions based on faith, not reason. No surprise that they stick with what they know, what has succeeded for them in the past, what presents no risk to them losing their job for advocating something new. The person who stands up and wants to do things differently gets the target on their back.

Point 2: marketers want mass audiences but mass audiences are fast becoming as rare as hens teeth. Why mass audiences? Because then marketing is a system. Design the system and then adjust it as needed. We already have the mass system—get a bunch of people and pound them as hard as you can with the same message.

But the web (and all media, in time) doesn’t conform. Given choices, people gather in smaller groups. They form social bonds or reinforce existing ones. They recommend things to each other, reflecting and tailoring to that individuality they always had. Mass media has lost its ability to focus those individuals into mass audiences at the same time as people have discovered they can do media for themselves.

So a new advertising system is needed to fit a web architecture, person-to-person, with a way higher return on attention. And that new system is emeging slowly in small pieces, loosely joined (Weinberger). Which makes a lot of people uncomfortable, even afraid, because I think they can feel it happening. Control shifting.

So who’s afraid of online advertising? Everyone already in advertising, and all the companies making their living off those people.

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