BRAND VANDALS

If I had $1 for every time I have seen people call themselves a “Digital Marketer”, or a “Performance e Marketer”, reckon I’d be as rich as Jeff Bezos.

One title I cannot recall ever seeing is Brand Marketer, yet building and maintaining brands is the number 1 priority for marketers. A recent article in Marketing Week by Professor Mark Ritson should be compulsory reading for anyone in marketing and advertising.

“Consistency is the top- class marketer’s secret weapon”.

And therein lays the problem – consistency is a secret weapon. ?Consistency is Marketing 101. Yet in 40 plus years in marketing and advertising, I have lost count of the number of new marketing managers who want to change what came before them. Again quoting Ritson:

This idiotic obsession with new at the expense of old is the subject of a remarkable report from System1 and the IPA.?“The Magic of Compound Creativity” is a powerful assessment of just how fucked up most marketing is. And how easy it would be to fix it with a little patience, a more accurate respect for the past and the ability to stick with it. ?

Why? In my experience it is nothing more than ego, which when combined with ignorance leads to, in technical terms “a cluster fuck”.

With technology change happening at warp speed, there is an unfortunate school of thought amongst far too many marketers that “everything is now totally different. What has gone before, and all of the basics are now out of date.”

In 2013 Les Binet and Peter Field published their seminal book “The Long and Short of it” - balancing longer term brand building with the distinctly different, short term response activities. This was the first mass published work, but anyone with marketing chops knew about balancing longer term brand building with shorter term tactical activities. (My first boss in 1981 talked about the distinct difference between the two).

Most digital and performance marketing are short term, often at the expense of long term brand image activities. As Ritson eloquently states “Marketers are an inpatient lot. We adore the pornography of change and drop our pants at even the faintest new trend or technology.”

Long term is exactly that – long term. It takes time and discipline to build a brand. So many marketing managers new to a role, do not want to follow “what has been”. There is no kudos (so they think) in that.

The appeal of performance and much digital activity is the speed with which a result is seen. Patience is a virtue, but to many marketers it is a pain in the arse.

Some examples:

Nike:?

Often portrayed as a “marketing powerhouse”. I recently read an interesting “obituary” of CEO John Donahue. In his 4 years as CEO, Nike lost 20% of their share market value, wiping out approximately $49.5 billion Australian dollars overnight. He took the reins at a time of massive societal change, which many CEOs and marketers believed would lead to a similar change in consumer behaviour.

Picking over the bones of his tenure, he made 3 major mistakes. All of which could be summarised as focusing on “short” at the expense of “long”. Or forgetting the basics of marketing which have not changed – the 4Ps. Many marketers who believed they no longer apply, have all come to grief.

Commonwealth Bank.

I have often wondered who the idiot (or bunch of idiots) was, who dropped the tag line:

?“Which bank”

Banks have been fumbling around for years, devising and dropping tag lines. The term “Which Bank” – not only became part of the lexicon, (more than any banks’ tag line.) It was an ideal expression of positioning:

Which bank gives you the best service

Which bank has the best home loans

And on it went.

Ask 100 people what is the tag line used by the CBA and can confidently predict less than half would know. “Which bank” had almost total recall, but along came a new marketing manager/team who wanted to put their stamp on it.

Imagine a new world marketing manager (if such a title exists?), for Mercedes Benz walking into a board meeting, saying:

“We need to move with the times. We have had that 3-pointed star for over 120 years. Time to piss it off for something new, more modern”.

“Don’t let the door hit you on the arse on your way out!” would be the response.

Doing it right. Toyota Hilux.

The latest TVC for Hilux is a perfect example of a highly creative execution of the same positioning. Hilux is widely renowned for “Tough, unbreakable”. (If you have not seen it, worth searching for. A cracker which shows great creative is not entirely dead, ) This is the same positioning Hilux had when I was at Saatchi in the late 80s (before the M & C split) I have no idea which agency now has Toyota or who created this spot, but they deserve to be congratulated.

It should also be noted that being “creative” in 2024 is far more difficult, with so many constraints, than it was in 1984.

Advertising has much in common with comedy. Many comedians have stated how the current social environment strangles their craft – being funny and woke simultaneously is an impossible path to tread,

I have watched, over the past 40 years, creativity in advertising being sucked out as wokeness gets sucked in.

?

?