Before you go out and buy a book about the next marketing fad, you ought to read a down to earth assessment on business fads first….
One is in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, where some level-headed thinking is exposed on how companies jump from consulting fad to fad, which one exec calls the “flavor of the month.” Jeffrey Pfeffer (a former colleague of mine at the Stanford Business School) tells execs to me more independent and to “systematically examine evidence about what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong instead of following what everyone else is doing.”
This is essentially why I don’t like case studies…because they focus on what some other company has done right (or wrong). That’s fine for some other company, but how does that relate to what you should do?
Another good article appears in the current Atlantic Monthly.
After reading these two articles, I’m once more convinced that marketers should be very, very wary of people who are touting the “new rules” of marketing. It seems like someone is trying to sell you something more than trying to help you market better.
Tags: Marketing_Fads
“I’m once more convinced that marketers should be very, very wary of people who are touting the “new rules” of marketing.”
Bingo! The rules haven’t changed, maybe the tools we have to aid us in reaching our community has, but the underlying principles have been in play since the Stone Age.
A timely article indeed.
I feel a lot of marketing gurus are spewing jargon and muddying the waters.
Few can walk the talk.
Funny coincidence: the latest issue of the New Yorker features the story of a very intelligent man who fell for a very stupid con, the infamous Nigerian e-mail scam. How? Because con men play on our emotions, not our intellects.
Now, I’m not saying every consulting fad is a con, but they do play to similar emotions. As long as people hunger for easy, sound-bite answers to difficult, complex business problems, we’ll have business fads.
Indeed! It seems to me that most of the people talking about new rules are those who want to disregard the basics, like listening to the customer.
If anything the emergence of new, consumer-controlled channels, such as blogs, is drawing upon the oldest forms of advertising, word of mouth, where quality rather than budget size determined who the winners were.
The Stone Age? Oh right, Mack…didn’t you head the creative on the “Be the First to Walk Upright!” chiseled-tablet campaign? (LOL)
Just kidding. You guys are right, of course. As David Armano says in his post today, it was awfully easy in the past to get drunk on “new rules” and technology. Hopefully we’ve learned a few lessons.
No I passed on the Fed-Ex cave-man spot…..said it would never get off the ground
Another favorite is the serial commenter that goes from blog to blog leaving comments like: ‘It’s like I keep saying….markets really ARE conversations’, or ‘Great point….this guy really GETS IT’, or my favorite, ‘I think what it all comes down to, is finding a way to ENGAGE the consumer’.
Jonathan — Thanks for referencing that New Yorker article — one of my all-time favorite magazines, as you know. That article, “The Perfect Mark,” is here:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060515fa_fact
In that same issue (which I can’t find the link for) was an article on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, “Me Media: How hanging out on the Internet became big business.”
Zuckerberg’s best quote in the article: “I think that understanding that there might not be any difference between what people are doing online and offline is something really important.”
It’s not “e-business,” or “internet marketing.” It’s just business. And it’s just marketing.
Like that last comment of Ann’s. “It’s just business.”
I use to a stand up bit in one of my seminars about how when fax machines were introduced, everyone was talking about “f-business” and going to “f-business seminars”. Not.
Someone once said, “if its new its not true, and if its true its not new.”
There are far fewer “new rules” than we think… or need seminars for.
Sorry for the vanity post, but we’ve not only tried them all, we’ve tried them all at the same time.
http://ktcatspost.blogspot.com/2006/05/too-much-of-good-thing.html
Still reflecting on this posting: it has my mind racing.
I remember walking through Meredith Corporation once here in Des Moines and seeing that every cube had a copy of Peter Senge’s 5th Discipline sitting on the shelf. I asked several people how they liked it. No one had read it, but it had been “supplied” by management “to be read”. I think that “Good to Great” has been the most recent “must read” – though I think Collins is a very readable author. Senge has great ideas, but not as easy for the casual reader.
Your post has on internet marketing is definitely true. Internet marketing has opened new ways of attracting visitors to the website giving the webmasters a way of earning cash as well as web status. Let’s see what the future holds for internet marketing.