The principles of post-advertising
Marketing has become an arms race that has led to hollow value and stifled innovation, where bad products with lots of media muscle can steamroll good ones with less resources, writes Andre Redelinghuys.
If brands and advertising have become less useful as tools to both companies and consumers, how can businesses grow?
Marketing has become an arms race that’s led to hollow value and stifled innovation. Bad products with lots of media muscle can steamroll good ones with less resources. The competition of overcrowded categories creates brands trying to outspend each other with ads that grow increasingly detached from reality.
The post-advertising world is not one without advertising, but one where our use of traditional ads and brands has peaked and a new model for growth is emerging. Five areas play a key role in shaping this change – lessons from the businesses leveraging these offer a potent blueprint for success.
1. Meaningful improvement
‘Bad products with lots of media muscle can steamroll good ones with less resources”
So you mean their marketing is better. Why is that necessarily a bad thing?
Some truths, some half-truths and some untruths. I think Andre might benefit if he worked for a while at a major manufacturer/marketer – Unilever, P&G, Colgate. It isn’t as simple as he seems to imagine. In fact, extremely complex. Way before Andre was born, in 1966 I took the wisdom of Unilever and transferred it into advertising agencies in a new multi-skilled role [marketing, market research, intelligence, planning and advertising]. The new role was later termed the ‘Planner’. It was a hard battle! But It proved to be revolutionary. So there’s always room for improvement. The greatest problem in commerce and everywhere is the obsession with convention and the resistance against innovation.