Marketplace: "Consumers are sick of spin, hype and empty promises"

Marketplace: "Consumers are sick of spin, hype and empty promises"
	13/12/2005

"In 2006, the long-predicted death of advertising will reach a critical point. Equally important, forward-thinking corporate leaders will build their marketing strategies not around media but around culture," states trend guru Faith Popcorn, CEO of BrainReserve.

Executive summary: CEOs must go beyond marketing to embed their products in the culture, says trend guru Faith Popcorn according to Chief Executive Magazine: "In place of that mass is an unruly, fragmented set of subcultures, each of which expects to be approached on its terms."

Edited by Peter Horn

"The “mass” in mass marketing has become an anachronism. In place of that mass is an unruly, fragmented set of subcultures, each of which expects to be approached on its terms. Marketing Interruptus (...) simply doesn’t work in today’s on-demand, consumer-driven culture. Buying media share (...) no longer buys you mind share."

This statement comes from trend guru faith Popcorn, CEO of BrainReserve, in Chief Executive Magazine. She claims that:

According to Ms. Popcorn, "the ineffectiveness and irrelevance of traditional media-driven messaging are glaringly apparent. Newspapers and magazines are being eclipsed by the Web. Online music sharing, satellite radio and podcasting are eroding the “ear share” of commercial broadcast radio. (...) Already, DVR users are skipping past 60 percent of the ads that they would otherwise see - the equivalent of $6.6 billion in media spending.

(...) People’s attitudes toward Fortune 500 companies and other established institutions have migrated from trust to distrust to outright dismissal:

"Consumers are sick of spin, hype and empty promises. They see through the latest efforts to salvage marketing as usual—whether through product placement, “buzz”-based promotion or some other contrived technique. Instead, they are turning toward peer-based sources of information about companies, products and services. At Web sites such as Epinions.com, for example, people swap comments about their experiences in the marketplace. Control of messaging has shifted decisively away from companies’ marketers and toward consumers."

Trapped in fool's paradise
Many business people (...) focus on sophisticated tools that give them a new and improved version of old-fashioned marketing metrics. With online advertising (...) (they take for) granted, these new metrics offer useful information on how consumers respond to an ad:

"If they’re clicking through to learn more about you and your product, then the ad must be working, right? Wrong. Those metrics run the risk of trapping leaders in a fool’s paradise (...) Today’s over-exposed consumers are immune to impressions. The challenge now is to move from impressions to connections, because it is connections that produce sales."

Culture is passion
In the new marketing landscape, culture is the new media, says faith Popcorn.

"For marketing purposes, the old media channels no longer work. It is through culture, and only through culture, that companies will reach consumers in the post-advertising future. “Culture” is what people are passionate about. It’s the music, the fashion, the language, the technology, the spirituality of generations," Ms. Popcorn states.

"Culturally relevant marketing is(...) a kind of genetic engineering, in which you weave the DNA of your brand into the cultural DNA of your target market. It will also result in a relationship with consumers that lasts."

The lesson for CEOs is simple, says Popcorn: "You can buy media, but you must invest in culture."

(...) So when your CMO meets with you to discuss your company’s media plan, stop her and ask this question—the most relevant question of all: “Who’s writing our culture plan?”

More on ther subject is to be found in Bache/Horn's book from 2002, "Emotional Economy" - "Conclusion: A new world – A Journey to the Inner Parts of the Soul" - on www.peterhorn.dk.

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