Box of Meat

Umair Haque in the Harvard Business Review: Marketing Can Do Better

‘The unvarnished truth is that the fundamental assumptions behind “marketing” haven’t changed for decades. Though you may be using slightly more efficient channels (like “social media”), more “creative” ideas, or more productive mechanisms (like pay-per-click), it’s still a militaristic, adversarial school of thought that’s largely about cramming “product” down the already overstuffed gullets of “consumers” by “targeting” “messages” jam-packed with illusory, imaginary benefits at them, in grand “campaigns” that make overblown promises (“See this beer? It’s going to land you the girl of your dreams!!”). I’d argue that marketing as we know it is, still, largely about talking down.

Marketing can do better. Here’s how: Instead of talking down, start listening up.

Here is what I don’t mean. Listening up doesn’t mean surveilling your customers, and then discovering slightly cleverer ways to trick them (yet again). Listening up doesn’t mean holding five thousand focus groups a year, and then price discriminating the daylights out of hapless customers. Listening up doesn’t mean delving into mines studded with billions of seams of “data” about “consumers.” Listening up definitely doesn’t mean techno-stalking people in creepy, weird, and slightly sinister ways.’

21 October 2010
13:45

Box of Meat