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The Business of Belief: Why We Believe What We Believe in Business and Life

 

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1. The marketplace is deaf

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3. Branding is a dangerous concept

Is marketing evolving?

I really don't think so.

In Better than Rational: Evolutionary Psychology and the Invisible Hand, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby explain that “form follows function: the properties of an evolved mechanism reflect the structure of the task it evolved to solve.”

So what is the structure of today’s marketing task?

Yesterday’s marketplace was a much simpler environment. People were easy to find, easy to reach, predisposed to buy, and easy to persuade. The marketer’s task was simply to make people “aware” of their new and improved offering. And they did just that, primarily through mega spending on mass media advertising.

But the marketplace has evolved. And it appears that it has changed faster than most marketers have changed.

While the marketplace pendulum has swung from a fascination with image and consumption to a preoccupation with experience and value, marketers continue to focus on exposure, message manipulation, and other extinct concepts. But mere awareness and persuasion are not the nature of the task today.

The marketer’s new task is one of clarity: How do we make it clear to our audience that we’re in business to help them (and not to hunt them)? How can we get a clearer view and understanding of our audience, so that we can design a business that best feeds their hungers? How can we provide them with a clear view and appreciation of the value of our offering? How can we make it clear to our people that their activities define our brand?

Clarity should be the guiding principle behind every marketing effort. Clearness of thought. Clearness of appearance. Clearness of purpose. Clarity should inform every campaign, drive every question, and rationalize every dollar spent and every piece of data captured and analyzed.

Whether you’re launching a large scale branding effort, producing an event, or simply crafting an email message, follow these two steps to marketing clarity:

1. Discover--Ask yourself; are we truly clear about our purpose and how to create value such that customers are continuously attracted to us? And by value, I mean distinctive value--a unique bundle of social, aesthetic, and functional meanings that feed their hungers to be liked, respected, and discerning. To feel good about themselves and their decisions.
2. Execute--Now that you understand how to create superior value, you must clearly, precisely and fanatically align all spending and activities to both communicate and deliver that value. Note: If you can’t find the value in an activity, it does not exist.

That’s it. Until marketers understand and embrace the concept of clarity, we’ll continue to witness millions wasted on new logos, goofy ads, irrelevant content, et al.

Open your eyes marketers! Your marketing plans are a smorgasbord of expensive and misguided tactics that collectively fail to add up to a clear and compelling idea--a reason to believe and to choose. We can see it. Why can’t you?

"To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world, a very noisy world and we're not going to get the chance to get people to remember us. No company is. So we have to be very clear about what we want them to know about us." - Steve Jobs

Posted October 7, 2011
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