The causes of
ineffective marketing
The revolutionary mindset
The Revolutionary mindset believes old world ideas and practices are not fit for purpose in the new world. Businesses need to do ‘modern’ marketing, and progress towards modernity can only be achieved by rejecting the past and rebuilding the discipline in a way that both reflects and fits the times. It has instilled an aggressive “adapt or die” philosophy: anything that is tied to a perceived orthodoxy must be torn down and replaced.
As businesses began pedestalling qualities and concepts like 'agility', ‘productivity’, ‘innovation’, marketing had to show that it fit that culture by switching to new ideas and practices as-and-when they emerged. The existing theories and practices were holding the discipline back, which has led to anti-establishment and anti-education sentiments within marketing.
ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT
The anti-establishment sentiment rejects proven best practices. It formed around a belief in the Narrative of Constant Change, which dictates the modern world is defined by the constant shifts and alterations that surround us, that these changes are all profound, and that they all fundamentally reshape how human beings see, think, and do things in the world. To be successful in this environment, marketing needs to be as protean as the world around it, like a species of shark that must constantly move to survive. The Narrative ultimately tells marketers that new = better, and whether it has been tested or proven is neither here nor there; the fact that it is made in the new world automatically makes its performance better in it.
​
The narrative creates two compulsive behaviours. The first compulsion is constant invention, as new = better demands that old is continuously replaced with new. Marketers figuratively and literally buy new acronyms, models, frameworks from experts, sages, and gurus on conference stages, podcasts, and bookshelves. They grab onto any new terminology and buzzwords coined and pushed by influencers, agencies, and publishers. They create new job roles to align themselves with vogue concepts like 'growth' and 'performance'.
​
The second compulsion is perpetual reinvention, as the Narrative demands that everything is changed to fit the new world. This comes in two forms: oversimplification and overcomplication. Oversimplification reduces it to something so generalised and non-specific that anyone can see it applying to them, and the intuitiveness is positioned as proof that a fundamental truth is present. Overcomplication takes something established, extracts a small part of it or makes a small iteration on it, and adds it back on as a new development: if they have 7 C's, they must be 75% more advanced and competent than someone using a mere 4 P’s.
​
There are two problematic implications of the anti-establishment sentiment that damage effectiveness. Firstly, belief that the things that work today won’t work tomorrow carries the implication that the effectiveness of anything is intrinsically time limited. Secondly, at some point new becomes old, modernity becomes antiquity, progressive becomes regressive, so everything has a shelf life. Together, these beliefs force continuous replacement with ever weaker alternatives: the inventions and reinventions all claim to have corrected a shortcoming or oversight in the original, but they are worse iterations on things that already exist. They have been overcomplicated to trigger a Dunning-Kruger effect or oversimplified to trigger a Barnum-Forer effect, not improved to create better outputs.
ANTI-EDUCATION
The anti-education sentiment rejects established marketing theory, forming around a belief that education and training make a marketer worse at their job. I think this started as a gross misappropriation of a thesis put forward by the late, great educationalist Sir Ken Robinson, who felt that the education system stifled creativity which limited potential in later life. This thesis got some fame, and notable influencers in the marketing space brought a corrupted version of it into the discipline, claiming it a fact that education would limit career potential. In a discipline already seeking reasons to avoid anything resembling a formal orthodoxy, it’s no surprise that this pseudo-causal negative relationship between ‘traditional’ knowledge and career potential caught on. The popularity of the sentiment made marketers actively hostile toward training and education, and an absence of it became a badge of honour to be worn with pride, the ultimate signifier of being a ‘modern’ marketer.
Rejecting education comes with an obvious consequence: there's a lot of things marketers can't do. Chief among them is creating solutions that are tailored to the specific problems and contexts at hand, as they don't have the grounding in the proven principles of effective marketing to draw from. This inability to create solutions has led to a reliance on "the": the answer, the method, the tool, the approach; the magic bullet in the form of a ready-made answer that can be copied-and-pasted into plans. Without the ability to create, the only option is to emulate. They pick and choose from a production line of “the” proprietary solutions: frameworks, blueprints, playbooks; the list goes on. All of them are formalised processes and procedures that promise to work straight off the shelf, universally applicable and guaranteed to succeed. They're often positioned against the ‘old’ options as new and improved versions of them, making them a no-brainer to marketers looking to reject and reinvent.
This has resulted in the trademark nomadism in marketing: the constant trend-chasing, fad-hopping, and bandwagon-jumping to find “the” one that works. Effectiveness is reduced because prefabricated answers don’t work: they are generic solutions to assumed problems, so they don’t address or resolve actual problems in the contexts they are faced in. Without a grounding in foundational principles, marketers don’t know that this why they are failing. They can’t course-correct by creating an appropriate solution, so they do the only thing they can: drop it and replace it with an even newer one, because newer means it must be better. Rather than well-planned and considered marketing, it plays the numbers: if enough things are thrown in the mix, odds are something will work eventually.
CONSEQUENCES
For several years, notable figures within the advertising industry like Dave Trott and Bob Hoffman have been pointing to a problem that has led to the advertising industry’s large-scale ineffectiveness. Advertising agencies are not creating work that is effective at making money for the clients, which is what they should be doing; they are creating work that is designed to win industry awards. The objective isn’t to increase the commercial returns for clients; it is to decrease the space in their trophy cabinets. The landscape is now dominated by gimmicks and stunt work designed to bait awards juries, and any benefit the client gets is merely an added bonus. Agencies are not interested in making adverts, they want to make artworks. Advertising is not made to get the attention of the general public anymore; it is made to get the attention of other people who work in advertising.
Trott and Hofmann could just as easily be talking about the overall marketing discipline, let alone the advertising part of it.
The “adapt or die” philosophy has made marketers image conscious. They feel the need to prove they have their fingers on the pulse, that they are fit to serve in the new world; and they need to demonstrate it in their work so that other marketers can see they are not out of touch and falling behind the times.
This has created two common types of marketing output. One is marketing for other marketers, which is primarily concerned with seeking validation. The work is more of a technical exercise for other marketers to appreciate, displaying awareness of the latest theory and proficiency in the current vogue practices. The second is marketing that talks to itself, which is primarily concerned with seeking approval. The content of the work is designed to impress other marketers, doing things that will be praised within the discipline for its show of rebellion or challenge to convention.
The outcome of this image consciousness has led to marketing having the same problem as the advertising industry: the intended audience has shifted from the public to peers, and the objective has shifted from effectiveness in the market to “effectiveness” inside the industry. Effectiveness is no longer determined by commercial returns or the contribution to business performance, rather how much other marketers are talking about it on social media. A short scroll will show a post about some ‘brave’ or ‘bold’ piece of marketing with hundreds of comments praising and celebrating it as a success; it’s also conspicuous that not one of the comments will be asking about its objectives, its performance against them, or discussing any quantitative results. Much like the goal of advertising has become winning industry awards, the goal of marketing is winning industry attention. For fear of being called old-fashioned, I believe that the success of marketing is determined by how well it performed against its objectives, not the number of other marketers that like it or have an opinion about it.
These outputs may get the attention of marketers, but it comes at the expense of being irrelevant to prospects and customers. The general public don’t know and couldn’t care less about the theory and practice of marketing, so the demonstration of it doesn’t increase its appeal to them; and the content doesn’t address their needs and wants or show it solves their problems, so it doesn’t resonate with them. This makes the marketing ineffective because it doesn’t get their attention, so it can’t appeal to them; if it can’t appeal to them it can’t resonate with them; if it doesn’t resonate with them, it won’t get them to take action.
OUTCOME
The revolutionary mindset warps priorities by placing form over function, as signalling ‘modernity’ to other marketers is more important than triggering action in the market. The focus is on outputs that other marketers consider to be good, not convincing prospects and customers that the product is worth buying. The “adapt or die” philosophy forces superfluous change that creates inconsistency and incoherence, stopping things being done properly and taking focus away from the things that matter; and self-consciousness that moves focus away from generating interest and desire in the market toward displaying modishness to others in the discipline. The anti-education sentiment has removed the theoretical foundations that provide a robust and holistic marketing programme, and the anti-establishment sentiment fills it with untested and unvalidated practices.