Every era has its torch-bearers who illuminate us with new and fundamental thinking in various disciplines. Marketing and communications seems to have lost this defining characteristic of intellectual activity. It has been so for a few decades.In the past one hundred years, business management, in all its forms, has formalized as a field of formal study and professional pursuit. It has almost managed to create a special class of business managers mostly armed with a formal MBA degree. The most externally focused in this class were the marketers. They shaped social norm and created magic. Throughout this period, the most exalted position has been that of an academic, professional, veteran or achiever who earned acknowledgement as a Guru.
The dictionary definition of one was “…an influential teacher or a popular expert”.
Synonymously, it was about being an authority, maestro, pundit, ustad. These walls have had names enriched with a halo: FW Taylor, JK Galbraith, Elton Mayo, Abraham Maslow, Douglas McGregor, Peter Drucker, Rensis Likert, Theodore Levitt, etc.
Even when it came to reflections on society and how it is shaped by forces of change, several thinkers were able to enlarge the boundaries of the field. Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, David Halberstam, Thorstein Veblen and Richard Hofstadter are names in mind.
As marketing and communications came into mainstream consciousness, several thinkers developed, defined, shaped and critiqued it. Ernest Dichter, Stanley Marcus, Coco Chanel, Vance Packard, David Ogilvy, Michael Sandel and Bill Bernbach all have left their signature on the theory and application of marketing despite being a very diverse set of individuals.
But from the late 1970s there has been a withering away of new thinking. In the ensuing period, founders and value creators flexed more marketing thought muscles than any designated guru. Be it Steve Jobs at Apple, Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, Ingvar Kamprad at IKEA, Richard Branson at Virgin or Bill Gates at Microsoft - these names are indelibly linked to new exploration, new industries and new brands.
THE CRUCIAL YEARS
The crucial connecting years till the present day saw the rise of technology, ubiquitous Internet, millennials and Gen Z consumers who arrived on the business map. All this happened without deep thinking being articulated. When industrialization made mass goods available, a new discipline of management and then marketing emerged. What emerged in the information economy?
In the main branches of marketing and marketing communications, tactical finesse and short term horizons seemed to kill depth. Self-promotion overwhelmed the gurus. Most became one trick ponies. Commercial exploration via books, seminars and corporate consulting became the norm. When the Internet changed the world forever, Marketing was seen to be resisting even adaptations for this new world.
Inertia beat IQ.
There was a need for an inductive approach to accord higher status to expertise over academic merit alone. What happened was that cynicism vetoed experience.
As a practising CMO and business leader, I concede that no elusive gurus can flourish if they are insulated from market forces and real consumers. Profound thoughts need to be landed in bazaars/ marketplaces. I also appreciate that institutionalized settings like Aspen, Davos, Cannes Lions and TED bring certain mobility to ideas. I am looking to find where the lacunae exist and this is what I can see:
1. Explosion of commerciality has eroded trust: The sheer growth in content means ideas get copied, parodied, diluted, corrupted. Bad ideas gain strength and become worse! Good ideas get lost in the cacophony and seem mediocre. And great ideas. Alas! We don’t seem to be thinking great ideas for a while. Ideas that move the world.
2. Marketing is the domain of the ephemeral, the short-lived, the quick fix-ers: Vibrant thinking is confused with style, confidence and fluency or articulation. Output from the media conglomerates, creative agencies and digital hotshops is all in a flux. Exodus of talent away from conventional marketing has accelerated in the new millennium. Ideas simply don’t have the muscle to keep running on the commercial treadmill. Formulas get preferred.
3. Not enough originality and experimentation: We seem to be junk food bingers. Everything immediately sating is welcome. Anything to chew and digest is avoided. As an industry, communications is not arming the dreamers against the realists.
4. Availability of press button info has made respect for erudition shallow: Everything is looked at here and now. There is no retained learning. Craft is shallow. Everyone has an elevator to go up an ivory tower. Marketing main form has got perverse, splintered and fragmented. A short burst of messaging, a few million e-mails, social messaging, a few catchy images, a few smart taglines, hashtags galore.
5. Dialogic learning has been reduced to capsules of downloads: Degradation is natural. Everything is an immediacy of sorts hence, nascent development is a casualty.
6. Commercial platforms get everybody onboard: We are living in a material world. Everything is ratecarded. One has to strain to imagine which independent assessment can be relied upon. Once a strenuous commerciality is backing a thought, it gets amplified in every farthest corner of the social/digital sphere. It is as ridiculous as an entire book being judged by blurbs on its front and back cover. But this is how things are.
The author is a marketer who writes on brandbuilding, politics and communication.
