Influx

In Adweek July 18th- Warren Berger wrote an interesting piece about the potential mid-life crisis of the ad biz.

“There are lots of tough questions companies must confront in
dealing with a consumer who’s more engaged, more informed and more
concerned with social issues than ever before. Among those
questions: What does the company stand for? What does it believe?
How does it make its products and treat its employees? Is it being
straight with us in its ads? All of these points are part of the
larger conversation people are now having about brands.”

This isn’t a crisis inflicting advertising, it comes from somewhere, it’s a corporate identity crisis- could corporations have lost track of their reason for being?

You sell stuff, we know that, but it’s not enough.

What’s your reason for being?

What do you want to do when you get to work in the morning?

Does you brand have a cause?

To the bean counters and the analysts on Wall Street, these things seemingly have nothing to do with the revenue and margin numbers they care about, but they do. The hard sell has gotten so pervasive and old, there’s a load of white noise out there with people “selling”, but doing nothing more. We are over-supplied with stuff and the noise that surrounds the perpetual consumer cycle is tiring people. They’ve found ways to cancel the noise and to find alternative sources of information. People want and need more and there’s so much more brands and their corporations could do.

It seems like we’ve confused marketing with purpose, that marketing is something that helped us out when we didn’t really have a clue about who we wanted to be and what we wanted our businesses to stand for.

Marketing was there to plug the holes and provide some sort of wrapping around the business. It created dreams, controlled thoughts and allowed business to make stuff and forget what they really stood for.

Sometimes marketing got close to capturing a real idea of what the brand and company stood for, there were moments when companies genuinely believed they were the “Human Element”, or whatever tagline their agency gave them, but it was fleeting, they soon lost interest. They found it too hard to genuinely believe in the idea and they probably felt that consumers didn’t really believe it. In the end, the marketing guys had created a hollow promise, something the brand or corporation couldn’t and didn’t want to live up to.

What about starting from the center and working outwards? Instead of asking your ad agency who you are, what about asking yourself some tough questions? This isn’t a marketing function, it’s a corporate function. It needs to start from the top and fan out across the organization, everyone plays a part because they are living proof of what the company believes in.

The time has come when brands need to stand up and be counted for something and they need to be disciplined and committed to that cause. They need to break free of the formula that’s guided their thinking for 50 years and get back to basics. They need to find a truth that’s something for the long-term, something that will be relevant today and in 20 years time and is real, honest and provable.

When the world around you is getting more confusing and scary by the day, you’ve got to be certain of who you are, without that, you are going to be lost at sea.

Posted by Ed Cotton