Shut down the War Room!

Why the time has come to de-militarise Marketing Thinking.

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The two big, really devastating wars of our times, are several decades behind us. One of the reasons the world has managed to avoid wars of that scale is the rise of diplomacy relative to military as a way of settling disagreements. In fact, today’s generation so prefers living to killing and dying that it would rather restrict world ravaging wars to movies and video and console games.

The Marketing discipline, however, seems to have got trapped somewhere in the thought and actions of the war. In our boardroom presentations as well as everyday choice of language, we so glamorize the metaphor of war that every other way of settling our ‘scores’ with consumers looks nearly naïve. We describe consumers as ‘targets’, segments of them worth ‘capturing’, we talk of marketing strategies in terms of ‘frontal’, ‘flanking’ etc, we expect our marketing communication to be ‘impactful’, and we use ‘intrusive’ tactics of ‘shock and awe’, ‘carpet bombing’, ‘air cover’. We talk of our budgets in terms of ‘firepower’. When translated into creative and media, we quite proudly use phrases such as ‘striking when the target is least suspecting’, we want to ‘outmaneuver’ our competitors, ‘defeat’ or ‘neutralize’ them, and we often try to do this by having a larger ‘share of voice’.

The truth is consumers have evolved from the post WW II days, the glory days of the military and marketing. For a few decades in the last century, they tolerated our armed invasion of their unsuspecting mind. Then they developed their own defence. As media and brand choices exploded, consumers started assuming control. Today, that control is nearly complete, often fueled by technology. The biggest ambassador of technology, the Internet, deeply touches even those people, who don’t think much of it. But while the Internet is the ultimate fuel for choice, choice itself is more than that. Choice is in our TV remote, in our mobile phones…more importantly, choice in our mind, in what can be called the hidden remote. As consumers exercise choice on media, media fragments. Those of us who feel helpless blame consumers, media owners and anyone else who will listen, about the media fragmentation and spiraling cost of reaching consumers.

Our world today is fundamentally different from the one where many of us got educated. Consumers are beginning to reject our ‘exploitative’ marketing techniques. They are punishing us by forcing us to redefine our old notions of brand loyalty. They are telling us to ‘stay out’. They have neither the time nor the patience to hear our long winded ‘me Vs ordinary’ stories. They know our TV commercials are trying to sell, not entertain. And they are skipping ads that we spend millions making. When they are not skipping, they are tuning off, using the mental remote. They are making us question the elaborate systems we have put in place to measure the ‘eyeballs’. As far as consumers are concerned, the eyeball and the brain [or the heart, if you please] are actually two different bodyparts.

The military led marketing is so weak now that Sergio Zyman became a bigger hero when he wrote ‘End of Marketing as we know it’ in 1999, than perhaps he was during the 30 odd years he spent practicing ‘marketing as we know it’. I might not agree with all that is inside Mr. Zyman’s famous book; but I believe that title is even more apt today than it was in 1999.

Our World is truly Connected and Communication is not a part of Marketing; it is Marketing.

Today’s young generation is often referred to as the download generation, unlike some previous generations. described as the ‘Pepsi Generation’ or the ‘MTV Generation’. Brands have less of a meaning to the new generation than they had to us. Forget pushing down the brand story through the consumer’s eyeballs, today marketers cannot even afford to upset the consumer. This is how ‘money back guarantee’, ‘click to unsubscribe’, and ‘opt-in’ have risen in their popularity. In a connected world, people are happy helping each other make choices, rather than wait for brands to come and fight it out inside their minds. The reason why word of mouth is more important than ever. Today, there is no bigger fear to a brand than not knowing when a consumer has rejected it. This is why companies and brands in the evolved markets are falling over themselves to set up official blogs. The begging is loud and clear – “If you have to say something nasty about us; please tell us first”.

Our society is looking down on uncalled for aggression

This is one of many contradictions of our times. Individually many of us are more aggressive in life. You see that at the airport, at the hospital, on telephone. But we want our parents, teachers, elected governments and brands – all those authority figures that dominated us in the past - to control their aggressiveness. We want our parents to be ‘friends’ to our children, we want teachers to stop flogging us in school, our governments to know that if they get too aggressive, we can go on the streets and on the Net and tell everyone to bring them down, and we certainly do not want our brands to intrude our minds and fight for supremacy. Actually, we are far less forgiving of brand aggressiveness, because unlike in the case of parents, teachers and governments, where we have little or limited choice, in case of brands we have nearly unlimited choice, and we are willing to exercise it just to prove a point.

Acceptance of aggression by the target is a precondition for the success of the military. Do we still believe militaristic marketing can work today?

The time has come to change the metaphor

I have often heard the line about ‘half of my advertising money getting wasted’. Is it possible that most of the marketing money gets wasted because of the militaristic blood-letting? Anyone who has tried to win a share of voice [SOV] game in marketing and media will empathise with me. SOV wars are mostly not won; they are lost. I wonder whether over emphasizing the role of competition in business and marketing is not an intrinsically wasteful strategy. Some people agree, I would say. Perhaps why ‘Blue Ocean’ is such a big deal, as is ‘Permission Marketing’.

The time has never been riper for marketing to learn from disciplines other than the military. Diplomacy perhaps? Or, Religion? Or should we learn from how people make friends and fall in love? Do I have an answer? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What is clear as daylight to me is this: Marketing in the opt-in age is less about brands and their firepower than consumers and their power of choice and peer influence. The faster we learn and apply this, the more money we will save to invest in engaging with more people who will buy and recommend our brands to more of their friends. What more could we possibly want?


[Published in The Financial Express May 4, 2006]