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Jon Bradshaw is the director of brand traction, a marketing consultancy for the modern age. He has over 20 years of experience in marketing and brand building. None of which is of any use any more. There are 24 metaphors in this article. Jon recognises he has a problem.

How to re-engage with your audience in the new marketing landscape

I’ve got a dirty secret. It’s one I share with many marketers. I’m an analogy addict. Try
saying that fast, five times in a row.

I can’t resist the lure of a good related story to dramatize my point. I find it impossible to just say what I want to say. I need to find a parable, a metaphor, a simile or even just a piece of urban mythology to dramatize my point. I guess that makes me a drama king. See even when trying to talk honestly about my addiction I use a bloody archetype.

No surprise then, that I can’t rid myself of this affliction when it comes to writing down
what’s on my mind about marketing. Marketing after all is littered with metaphors and
analogies. The worst thing, however, is that I genuinely believe marketing is at a moment
in time when it’s all about to change.

We are at an inflection point. A crossroads, would be the more obvious of popular symbols to pick to represent where I feel the profession and industry are at. The problem is that history is littered with analogies for the hero, facing impending doom. There’s a million metaphors to choose from. I feel like a kid in a toyshop. Yup there I go again, even when talking about how to pick analogies, I use an analogy. I tell you it’s a disease.

One oft used story is that of the boiled frog. Its urban myth that the frog gently heated in
a pan of water will not leap out. But it serves to make the point. In a somewhat cruel and
unusual way. As marketers I do believe we are being gently cooked, as the consumer
landscape heats slowly up and we stay resolutely still.

Canute is another powerful tale that represents where I think we are. A true one to boot.
I’d use the traditional spelling of his name but it wreaks havoc with my spell check. I do
genuinely see many of my colleagues and friends standing resolutely on the shores of
advertising as the seas of change roll steadily in.

So how to pick one? How best to exemplify my point. How do I light the blue touch
paper, set the platform alight and put a rocket under the ass of Aussie marketing?

I’ve ended up with Climate Change. It’s a really good metaphor for what I want to say.
Not that I believe the challenges facing marketing are the same scale or impact as our
environmental crisis. They’re much bigger than Al Gore’s little temperature problem for
God’s sake. But I do think the marketing environment faces some of the same challenges.

• The data is indisputable. There’s a seismic shift underway.
• A large number of people, especially the manufacturers of marketing fossil fuels,
are in total denial about what’s happening.
• There are a heap of snake oil salesmen selling the marketing equivalent of windfarms
and hybrid cars.
• Nobody has a clue about what to do instead.

So I’m going to try to talk about some of that. A bit like Al Gore, I’m probably going to
ask as many questions as I answer, but I’m hoping to leave you no longer in denial and
somewhat hopeful that you don’t have to be underwater in 5 years time. Here’s how I’m
going to do that.

1. I’m going to set the platform alight. I’m going to re-present the data and hope
that you draw the same conclusions from it that I have. That the crucial question
to answer is no longer what to say in our marketing, but how do we get anybody
to listen?
2. I’m going to talk about how advertising and marketing has evolved as new media
have emerged and try and explain WHY some things have worked and others
haven’t. Why does the audience respond to some things, not others?
3. I’m going to hang it out there and suggest how it might have to evolve further to
really deal with the challenges and access the opportunities the new environment
has to offer.

Five years ago I used to describe myself as a marketing expert. I knew how to do
marketing. I’d been well trained at Mars, Diageo and Virgin and I knew my stuff. It may
just be the descent into senility and the onset of my second childhood, but nowadays I
don’t feel I can say that. Nobody I know, knows how to do marketing anymore. I’ve gone
from marketing guru to marketing novice. So of course I’ve started my own consultancy!

The best I can say in a pitch or an interview nowadays, however, is that I am an expert in
re-learning how to do marketing. I’m not living in denial. I know the world changed and I
need to play catch up and play it fast. I’m going to talk about why I feel that way. As
always with these things I make no pretence of being right. I gave up the illusion that I
might be right, about the same time I gave up on the idea that I could dance.

But I hope to make you think. Maybe you can start where I have got to and make some sense of it all. First though, I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that not EVERYTHING has changed.

In and amongst all this turmoil, the job has not changed. Marketing’s role is to change the way customers and consumers behave, usually in order to make more money for the organisation. If we can focus on doing this for the long term, not just the short, we are doing our job really well. Whilst that may seem a trite truism it’s always worth restating, as the real world gets in the way all too often and we end up focused elsewhere. On things like awareness and likes and awards and a whole heap of other things that might be good measures, but aren’t good reasons.

As we break that truism down there are some other constants in all this change. The tasks we need to perform haven’t changed. We need to acquire new consumers, get the current consumers to buy more, keep those consumers and persuade them to pay a higher price. I also believe the fundamentals of the way to change long term behaviour also hasn’t shifted. We need to create a true, differentiating and motivating brand positioning, wrap it in a powerful brand identity and then find ways of communicating it to the people who we want to affect in a comprehensible, impactful way.

Our purpose, our goals and our message haven’t shifted. But the medium has. It’s shifted
radically and fundamentally and it’s going to keep on shifting for quite some time yet.

Most call it ‘digital’ to try and contain it in a box, but I think its much, much more complex
than that. The medium is not defined by the transmission technology. For me its about
the changing way our audience consumes media, not how the media arrives into their
lives. It’s my opinion that we are still mostly trying to fit square peg advertising into
round media holes. I realise that’s yet another analogy, but I think it makes the point quite
clearly.

The way we connect to people, the way we communicate our message, the way
we engage with an audience, has to change fundamentally, because the audience is
changing its media consumption habits. If we keep trying to blast out a message to an
audience that isn’t listening and doesn’t care, we won’t achieve the same results. At that
point, marketing will no longer make the organisation more money. Then the analogy is
simple. You and me and the rest of the marketing profession are then royally,
fundamentally and irrevocably screwed.
Continue reading “Advertising climate change – are we all in denial? ”