I was talking in Vancouver yesterday. The slide that everyone seemed to like the best has “shoot the lawyers” as its title. My argument is that we have to be much more free with our intellectual property.
The other slide that got an audible response was the one about resetting our tolerances as marketers. In the old regime, we are risk averse and inclined to control the marketing message as much as possible.
But its clear that as we bring consumers into the process cocreation, as we participate more fully in contemporary culture, we are obliged to give up control. The brand can no longer be the perfectly formed, pristine thing we hoped it would be.
As it is, senior decisions makers stick to the old standard. They still believe in the pristine brand. It is people under 40 that understand we need to reset tolerances.
So, I feel to thinking: what if we colloborated on a manfestio that made the new tolerances not the daring risk of a marketer, but a collective declaration, and a way especially of telling the senior decision makers, “look, the world has changed.”
Ok, have to catch my plane. I will come back to this theme, tonight or next week.
Controlling the marketing message is impossible. Brand is what is in people’s heads, not what marketers say it is. I know Grant’s seen this, but Noah Brier’s site http://brandtags.net is a clever way to see what brands actually elicit as opposed to the intended marketing message.
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Even before marketing set the rules brands were perceived as strongly related to the “creator” role and identity. The name marque in French or Marca in Italian, the equivalent of brand, derive from the same root as the words marcher or marciare (to march): leave a footprint. In this sense, it is very hard, even for young marketing managers (that seldom speak medieval European languages) to accept the fact that someone else con shape the size and the form of one own footprint.
Check out this. http://leemaschmeyer.googlepages.com/TheHackingofModernMarketing.pdf. It’s a manifesto of the sort you’re thinking. I think.
Why a manifesto? That seems too much like talking about doing it, instead of just doing it. How about just doing it? I’d love to see that. Wait, I’m banking on seeing that!
And thanks for the great talk in Vancouver. As one of the audience members, those two slides were memorable, along with a great many others.