Many successful practitioners of Management and Marketing science have reduced it to hyping single words like ‘creativity’, ‘thinking’, ‘strategy’ or unwieldy combinations like ‘consumer-mindedness’ or ‘excellence in execution’.There are even more cringe-worthy motherhoods such as “Keep an ear to the ground”, “Think like your enemy”, etc. Sigh!
Business is the fundamental substrate of modern society and Marketing is its cementing element. Both need very detailed elaboration. What modern capitalist society is seeking from its marketers is not a better tagline or a shinier neon sign. It is looking for core ideas.
Capitalism needs solid platforms that organize and operationalize value and wealth creation. The rising trade of damning opinion journalism against consumerism as well as consumer fickleness or apathy is because there are no big ideas that have emerged.
Apple is the last marriage of technology, design and an organizing, advancing idea for the enterprise. In my opinion, Facebook and Google/Alphabet don’t have it despite enormous and aweinspiring valuations.
Overall, media vehicles have added to the cacophony. Ideas are poorer, more blurred, easily drowned in noise, dropped prematurely or simply not primed up enough with investment. Where we need to be planting oaks, we have a quarterly bonsai forest instead.
Additionally, there is an intellectual establishment of some gurus, certain consultancies, and tech-mavens who make a fetish of ‘singular ideas and focus’. Therefore, only a few pre-vetted ideas see the light of day. All of these are blessed by this establishment and then templated into ‘workbook’ and ‘manuals’. Those CMOs and business leaders who buy into the “idea of the year” are then putty in the hands of this establishment because even their objections are listed in the ‘manual’.
Developing these manuals, conducting the workshops, iterating the charter is a lucrative and growing industry by itself. This playbook-peddling idea elite is doing a disservice to the business world. I am not suggesting that one should discard or ignore conventional wisdom irrespective of its merits. Nor am I saying that there is a virtue in deliberately discounting the importance of credibility and reputation. I want us to celebrate more ideas - brave ideas, atypical ideas and ideas that buck prognostications of eventual doom. I wish we celebrate bold ideas that can make a future. The international marketing and economic order needs to be fundamentally seeded with bold big ideas.
If one sees the world of Economy, State Policy and International Affairs, we note that there are a dozen practitioners and thinkers always leaning in with precious commentary. Henry Kissinger, statesman and former Harvard academic, Paul Krugman of New York Times, Thomas Friedman of New York Times, Robert Kagan of Brookings institution, Francis Fukuyama of Hoover Institution, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic - are all examples that have no parallel in the world of Marketing ideas. By the way, this is doubly revealing since Marketing is a domain of ‘always on’ action and relatively low entry barriers and still, sadly, thinking and ideas are in acute short supply.
We need ideas. Ideas that are forceful; Ideas that are catalyzing.
Ideas that are not pleasing; Ideas that change things.
Ideas that create movements; Ideas that unsettle.
Giant multi-national corporations and agency networks cannot abandon the watchtowers to look for ideas outside. Enough is not happening within.
When I say idea, I do not mean a script, tagline or key visual. Those are merely artefacts and outputs serving various brand-building objectives in a 360-degree campaign. What I mean by an ‘idea’ is the spectrum of intellectual outputs and opinions that find expression and advancement because marketers and business builders adopt them.
Of course, Marketing being a social science, obviously weighs competing potential ideas subjectively but more and more it is clear that the Marketing role, right up to CMO, is about dashboard management, facilitation, and managing messaging up and down the value chain. It does not seem to be about penetrating ideas that public intellectuals would ponder over. Ad agencies have starved the planning function because revenues are poorer and anything that looks like it’s not directly bringing in a client’s purchase order is subject to cuts.
Therefore, what is happening is that confidence is trumping intellect.
Agency thinking is lapsing to becoming a conduit for second-hand ideas. Smart phraseology is masquerading as wisdom.
Recycled ideas get poorer results; panic and frenzy then lead to digging a bigger hole. Charlatans and bogus intellectuals advance even poorer ideas into the Marketing mainstream right up to the caviar and champagne gatherings on yachts in a blue corner of an empire where the sun is setting. Fast.
The author is a marketer who writes on brandbuilding, politics and communication.
