ABSTRACT
Nostalgia for simpler, more profi table days appears to be a constant feature of popular books on marketing communication. These are the types of books written by successful professionals in the marcoms business (or occasionally by successful academics who also have consultancy positions) and which purport to instruct readers in the latest, sure-fi re techniques for closing that sale, reaching that prospect, persuading that switcher, or using the web to monetize their customer database. It is a tradition that the opening chapters of such texts must include a (sometimes bordering on the hysterical) lament for the fact that the marketing business isn’t what it used to be, that the reliable tools of old are no longer up to the job of communicating effectively with new types of audiences exhibiting new types of behaviors and attitudes. One of the most common sources of disruption identifi ed by these books is what has come to be called “clutter”—the sheer, vast tidal wave of media messages that we are subjected to from when we open our eyes in the morning to when we close them to sleep at night. So, Al Ries and Jack Trout, in their infl uential book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, after providing the reader with a fl ood of fi gures regarding the information overload that besets us all in the “overcommunicated society”, note that:
The average mind is already a dripping sponge that can only soak up more information at the expense of what’s already there. Yet we continue to pour more information into that supersaturated sponge and are disappointed when our messages fail to get through. (Ries & Trout, 2001, p. 7)
Ries and Trout offer their theory of positioning as the way to cut through this clutter and reach the mind of the prospect. And they have been doing so since 1972. Seth Godin plays the same cards in the opening of his Permission Marketing:
This is a book about the attention crisis in America and how marketers can survive and thrive in this harsh new environment. Smart marketers
have discovered that the old way of advertising and selling products isn’t working as well as it used to and they’re searching aggressively for a new, enterprising way to increase market share and profi ts. (Godin, 2002, p. 23)
The problem is the same, then, but the solution is different-instead of positioning, Godin is offering permission marketing. And this pattern continues across the years and at different resolution levels. David Ogilvy comments in his Confessions of an Advertising Man that the “sad truth is that despite the sophisticated apparatus of the modern agency, advertising isn’t getting the results it used to get in the crude days of Lasker and Hopkins” (Ogilvy, 2004, p. 47). It seems that wherever and whenever you look, marketing communication professionals are complaining that marketing communication doesn’t work in the way it used to. The trope is echoed in the work of academic researchers. So, Sut Jhally, quoting a J. Walter Thomson report from 1984, writes that “commercial viewing levels are decreasing” (Jhally, 1990, p. 89) and notes that consequently “advertisers are starting to voice their discontent at having to pay for viewers who may not be watching their advertisements at all”. Similarly, the academic/ practitioner team of Wright-Isak, Faber, and Horner writing in the late90s speak of advertising agencies being “on the defensive” and having to “scramble to produce facts that indicate a positive evaluation of the advertising contribution” due to the “recurring recession” and “environment of advancing globalization” (Wright-Isak, Faber, & Horner, 1997, p. 3). Paul Marsden of the London School of Economics, writing in 2006, devotes the introductory chapter of Connected Marketing to delineating the “state of turmoil” in the marketing industry by citing a barrage of dire U.S. fi gures that illustrate amongst other things, that the “failure rate for new product introductions” is 95%, that the “proportion of B2B marketing campaigns resulting in falling sales” is 84%, and that the “proportion of TV advertising campaigns generating positive ROI” is 18% (Marsden, 2006a, p. xix). There is, without a shadow of doubt, a signifi cant rhetorical element in this constant depiction of crisis. Every voice here is trying to persuade the reader that they have the solution or the answer or, at least, the most effective analysis of the condition, and talking up “the crisis in marketing” (as Marsden refers to it) is a way to try to increase the audience’s perception of the need for a new approach. We can see Kotler taking advantage of the same rhetoric in Marketing Management when he writes in the opening paragraph of the marcom section:
But communications gets harder and harder as more and more companies clamor to grab the consumer’s increasingly divided attention. To reach target markets and to build brand equity, holistic marketers are creatively employing multiple forms of communications. (Kotler & Keller, 2006, p. 535)
In other words, holistic marketing joins positioning, permission marketing, marketing public relations, viral marketing, or connection marketing as the answer to the (seemingly ongoing) marcoms crisis.
