The world of big brand, ‘corporate-style’ marketing loves the status quo. It sees itself, first, as a management machine. It just happens to manage brands. It is not in the business of culture building. By implication, it shies away from big ideas, and avoids disruption and content innovation. For it, marketing return on investment is the ultimate result metric. There is growing evidence that real cultural movements are more often pioneered out of entrepreneurial small shops and rebel outfits. It is perhaps because they are not big enough to be dominated by cadre-based, departmentalised marketing bureaucracies. Smaller, focused, more risk-friendly, entrepreneurial outfits lack the financial and organisational muscle of giant corporations. However, they are far more sensitive and responsive to real consumer culture, sociological drift, and origins of demand. Big corporations dominate; hence, to them, change is a threat. Small outfits have nothing to lose; hence, change is seen as an opportunity. Big brands develop a strategic lethargy—an inertial lack of urgency or interest. There is a self-interested commitment to do the mundane. The reason for it is success and the resulting risk aversion.Success promotes ‘formula friendliness’. Those who are successful fall into a repetitive mode of brand activity.
In 1878, much before marketing, brand management, or advertising became formal disciplines, a Harvard law student named Frederick Winslow Taylor left his studies to become a middle manager at Midvale Steel Works in the United States. He reported a plan to ‘maximise efficiency’ via a ‘scientific evaluation’ of work rates. His method, time and motion study, is credited with inventing scientific management. Taylor was soon hailed as a genius and the world’s first management guru. His book, The Principles of Scientific Management became a bestseller. Thereafter, decisions had to have an objective indisputable arbiter called data. Taylor died in 1915, but his work led to formalisation of management studies as a discipline. The MBA was well on the way.
As corporations grew exponentially and reached multinational proportions, a Max Weberian bureaucracy became well-established everywhere. The MBA era had begun. There were two major streams of resulting change. First, a data-led quantification, efficiencydirected planning, and science-based logic for creative development. Second, the development of a hierarchical, matrixed bureaucracy managing brands. These streams combined into a cesspool of cultural stagnation. Decision-making became top-down. Of course, science-based hygiene marketing worked well in the initial growth phases of sectors such as FMCG, colas, telecom, and automotive. But, apart from some ‘pop psychology’ added into the mix, by and large, it was devoid of any input from the humanities. Numerical analysis, outcome-based modelling, and gradual incrementalism became the prescribed norm. These orthodox success models were imbibed by young, starry-eyed marketing trainees and generations of these ‘indoctrinated’ managers rose to authority further perpetuating endless repetition. More of the same, in reality, became a sort of dogma, though never enshrined as such. Fatigue was lauded as consistency and dull advertising was excused as being efficient. MBA marketers dominated corporations. These people were often, competitively speaking, the brightest. With their right qualifications and credentials came dominance and clout. From clout came access to capital. Therefore, new acquisitions and funding for growth also followed the norm.
Entrenched MBA marketers could buy attention, salience, and mindshare via massive investments in media. The supporting ecosystem, namely, market research, advertising, and public relations also perpetuated the method. Slick charts, glossy cover stories, and influential seminars acclaimed their success. Then the ground began to shake. The world started changing. The pace of this change was unprecedented. The late 1970s was the watershed year. Then began the deluge with the rise of the internet era. Now, the world is different from any time in the past in terms of content. The moment you open your mouth as an individual, as a brand, or as a business, you risk being washed away in a flood of noise and clamour. Millions of commercial messages are blasted every day and round the clock. Marketing, for the first time, actually has a chance to be something far more than an intrusion into peoples’ lives. The problem is that the marketing establishment has just too many lazy, bad habits it needs to break out of to get there. This audience-powered success can happen only if marketers sell beyond the product. We, as marketers, must start to live the story and to tell the story we live. The problem is: we have inherited the practices of an industry, which is spoiled by television and other overused, ratecarded channels and platforms. These paid media outlets have lulled us into a sense of creative lethargy. They have dominated marketing for almost an unbroken century and this model is now dramatically withering away.
The entire infrastructure that surrounds marketing is still deeply invested in that broadcast model. Even though, we are living that shift to peer-to-peer, earned media, the problem is few of us have truly begun to grasp what it means in its entirety. This is worse as you go up the marketing hierarchy, where wilful self-delusion prevails. Very few corporations have a setup to provide for audience-powered success. In today’s world, there is message fatigue, clogged inboxes, and a cacophony on television. Therefore, if marketing has to be socially esteemed, it has to be owned by the community and it is best that it originates from the community. Brands have to have core ideas, which are powerful, resonant, and resilient, and to be able to put them in a storyline. Brand narratives have to make themselves wear clothes of a story, character, conflict, and plot. Only after that can they hope for the best. Of course, they will be transmitted, bruised, and battered. They will live or die according to how appealing they are. But that is the point. One cannot be a broadcaster hoping for passive consumers. One needs to be a storyteller, sitting amidst a large group of people who are not passive consumers, but partners.
People who tell and believe the same stories basically hold the same values, because belief in a story is about the value system, and belief is beyond rationality. So, the reason why consumers can relate to a brand at a universal level is because in our experiences of the world—our basic emotions, our engagement with the world—there is a certain sense of a global human community when things are shared. These stories are shared, therefore the values are shared, therefore the worldview is shared, and that is why social media communities are important and build brands. The fate of our world is being written in marketing campaigns. More than half of the world’s largest economies are not sovereign nations, but in fact corporations. Marketing is the language through which corporations speak to the world, and therefore marketing carries tremendous clout. The most serious threats we face—climate change, resource depletion, species loss—are crises of overconsumption, and these stories must, therefore, make the change that we want to see the world undergo. Marketers know that the traditional ways will not work. So, it is suddenly a case of evolve or die. The good news is that the audience needs us as much as we need them. People everywhere are looking for ways to make sense of the rapidly changing world around them. An era of inspired marketing has dawned. The all-powerful marketer—controller of the earlier world—has no place here now.
Cover story published in Indian Management December 2019 issue.
https://www.aima.in/media-centre/publications/indian-management-december-2019.html