Why I hate marketing

Common Sense Idea 1. Marketing is not a science.

I hate the word ‘marketing’. Not because of what marketing does, more because of the people who hide behind it. Too many people in large corporations and academic institutions attempt to make marketing out as some kind of science, I assume to make themselves look and sound important.

Marketing is really common sense with a dose of good ideas thrown on top. This business function should be renamed just that. But then all the people paid huge amounts in global corporates and universities around the world would have to put down their market research and positioning analysis, full of acronyms and the latest buzz words. They would no longer be Executive Vice President, Marketing and Brand Strategy, but only a person with common sense and good ideas.

Marketing has now become so full of reports, graphs, analysis and layers of people that it no longer creates new or strong ideas. It has done this to be safe. Safely predict what a new idea will do. Safely justify why money should be spent. Safely cover somebody’s back as they put forward their marketing recommendations and strive towards the corner office and an upgrade in their company car.

But marketing is not safe. Nothing new or bold ever is. The best advice I’ve had on this was from Phillip Poole, my client at New Zealand Lotteries. He said something like, ‘Here’s the best way to judge an idea: if you react to it with nervous excitement, it is probably right. If it makes you totally comfortable, then it has probably been done before and is too bland so it will die alongside the clutter in the massive misspend of marketing wasteland.’

Nervousness is a natural reaction when forging into new territories. Yet everyone in marketing the world over seems to want to remove nervousness and remove risk, and they typically justify this by adding a whole heap of flash self-serving analysis. This is the malfunction of modern marketing.

Bold leaps in business come from taking some form of risk. Nothing great was ever achieved without having a go.

Great marketing comes from great culture – a culture where there is freedom to have a go, freedom to take a risk and to live with nervousness. Coming up with safe solutions that achieve a one percent rise in market share is easy, and sadly it is often all that is needed to get to the corner office and a bigger title.

Marketing is part art. The great artists didn’t become great because they did something that was five per cent different from the artist before them. They created something totally new, involving risks and the likelihood of criticism. This is also true for marketing.

The ‘B’ in DDB where I worked was Bill Bernbach. I have a little book of his sayings, and I especially like these two:

Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula.

The real giants have always been the poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.

Bill is the guy who basically changed the face of advertising forever. In Madison Avenue during the 1960s (the time when TV’s Mad Men is set) he created ads that were more than just exaggerated claims with happy, smiling, middle-American families. The famous Volkswagen ‘lemon’ ad was one of his. Bill’s ethos lives on within DDB, and others have described key values. When I attended a worldwide management meeting for DDB’s future leaders in 2001, I learned of the freedoms that DDB head Keith Reinhard listed as necessary for great culture.

With these as part of your culture, marketing can be powerful. It can get your attention. It can surprise you. It can make you like one brand more than another, and make you pay more for it. This can be done without costing a fortune.

In the early years of 42 Below, I swore I would never be sucked into the typical risk-averse behaviour I had fought for so many years. For marketing to be good, it cannot be risk averse. If it is, it will be the same as other stuff and therefore, dull and impotent.

Common Sense Idea 2. Brands need real roots.

There are plenty of opportunities in business to create new brands and new products. Market niches are developed all the time (usually by entrepreneurial risk-takers), then bigger companies come in with their creation, hoping to join a new growth category.

The problem all too often with their response is that consumers recognise it as exactly that – a response – and know that the product lacks a genuine reason for being. There is no history, no passionate founder madly obsessed with the integrity of their product, no relevance in the origin. And despite truckloads of money being thrown at it, the product often fails. Brands need genuine roots and credentials to succeed.

Plenty of vodkas came on the market during the 42 Below era. Despite fancy packaging, pretty good taste and truckloads of marketing spend, they failed because they had a fakeness to them. Vodka from New Jersey, made by a large beverage company, just doesn’t feel right. There is no real credibility in the provenance and no real love has gone into the conception.

42 Below always had proper roots and credentials. It was born on the forty-second parallel, where a world benchmark for air purity is set and in a country that looks something like the set of The Lord of the Rings; a country that feels like a pure place, one where good vodka would come from. And it wasn’t created by a company hell-bent on moving containers because others were making money here and therefore, they should too. Rather, it was created by people who loved vodka, knew vodka and knew how to make great cocktails. There is a big difference, and consumers can see this. With the Internet and Google, in particular, people can check out your backyard pretty quickly.

• This information is provided by Geoff Ross:
  
  www.ecoya.co.nz