Naked Marketing E-Book

J. Christian Andersen

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 95

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Traditional marketing is dying. It’s getting more and more difficult to get the attention of consumers. Advertising is the cost of being boring. In the old days, companies broadcast their message to their customers through slick ads and sales people. But consumers got tired of listening. Now the customers are talking. They’re talking to each other, their friends, colleagues, and family members. Unless you give them something worth talking about, they won’t be talking about you or your product. Companies – and their marketing programs – are no longer opaque. They have become naked. In this book you will explore how you need to redefine your marketing if you want to connect with your customers. Part travelogue, part extended essay, this book is the perfect guide on how to navigating in a naked world.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction

The Naked Emperor

Chapter 1

A Brief History of Advertising and its Inevitable Decline

Chapter 2

Transparency Makes the Façade an Illusion

Chapter 3

Frankenstein’s Monster Looking for Love

Chapter 4

The Key to This Business is Personal Relationships

Chapter 5

#thischangestheworld

Conclusion

You are Naked Too

Postscript

Introduction

The Naked Emperor

Let me begin with the familiar fable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” As the story goes, one day the Emperor hired two weavers who promised him the finest and most regal suit of clothes. The fabric to be used was so exalted, it could not be seen by anyone who was either unfit for his position or was hopelessly stupid.

As soon as the Emperor endorsed the project, the swindlers began their work. They set up a state-of-the-art workshop that appeared to be busy with activity. Of course, no one in the castle could see the fabric the two were allegedly using, but no one said anything. It was not their place to do so, and no one wanted to admit to being stupid.

After making a show of working diligently and collecting their fat fee, the swindlers reported the costume was finished. They pretended to dress the Emperor, who proudly marched in procession before his subjects. The townsfolk played along with the pretence, not wanting to appear stupid or unfit for their positions. Then a child in the crowd, too young to understand the advantages of keeping up the pretence, blurted out that the Emperor was wearing nothing at all – he was naked. In short order, the Emperor was disgraced.

There was a time when consumers – just like the townsfolk – could be fooled by such a scam. But today, no company can hide behind flashy advertising and marketing. Sooner or later – maybe not in a parade, but on social media, or simply friends or colleagues talking to each other – a person will point and say, “This is all fake!”

This new paradigm is slowly seeing the daylight, and nowhere in the world is it stronger than in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2007 the city’s business community had to face a new reality when all advertising in public spaces was banned. As you will find out, this act of “creative destruction" (a term coined by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942) pushed regional companies to rethink and innovate their marketing. In many ways, São Paulo represents the city of the future, and for us on the other side of the world it is a crystal ball through which we can look into the future and see what will soon become reality for the rest of us.

I had to experience the miracle of São Paulo for myself. Working with companies for years and always curious why some companies stand out of the crowd, I saw travelling to São Paulo as a compelling opportunity I couldn't miss. Equipped only with my computer, an open mind, and a journalist contact, I boarded a plane for São Paulo.

I had no idea where this journey would take me, but I was eager to find out.

In the pages of this book, you can share what I experienced on my trip to the southern hemisphere. Together we will visit four fascinating people. I chose them wisely and with a strong intuition that they could each bring new understanding and new insights to the challenge of marketing, and together they would form what would hopefully become a beautiful picture of the future. The four people are a professor, an ad agency executive, a marketing director, and finally a man who had designed a ground-breaking campaign for one of the biggest banks in South America, a campaign that pointed the way towards a new approach to marketing – one that aligns business with a progressive movement.

Connecting to Customers

In this book, we’ll explore how marketing has become free-form, digital, and collaborative. What was once easy to define – a TV ad buy, for example – has become multi-faceted, more nuanced, and more connected to people's lives.

In the new world of naked marketing, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. But that’s okay. What we need to remember is that at the end of the day, business is fundamentally human. Natural, human conversation is the true language of commerce, and corporations work best when the people on the “inside" make a sincere connection with the people on the “outside."

Evolving into naked marketing means going from organisation to organism. The system is organic. Rather than to compete against each other, people are increasingly motivated to collaborate and work towards collective goals. We embrace collaboration for new ideas and open-forum conversations that spark more “human" campaigns.

Because it’s not what you learned in business school, you may be puzzled as you read this. But as you will soon find out, this is not theory; it’s already reality.

Naked Marketing celebrates and outlines the non-deceptive tactics used to engage modern consumers – tactics modern consumers are beginning to expect. Today’s consumers will no longer allow big media, corporations, or any other seller to lie to them. In terms of products, they want to understand exactly what they are sold and they want the marketing message to be honest. Increasingly, consumers also want the corporation – global giant or neighbourhood shop front – to reflect and embody their values and ideals. This comes with increased awareness of how companies conduct their business.

Consumers themselves are becoming more and more central to spreading the word about products. The word can be good, bad, or a combination of both. Consumers use the web to create links to content and social media applications shared between friends. Supercharged by the internet, the new digital forms of word-of-mouth are becoming increasingly powerful.

Gone are the days of a company acting as the singular voice of its brand in the marketplace. In a world filled with social media, blogs, email, texting, and the capability for any individual to voice his or her opinion about any brand through the use of these tools, a naked approach to your marketing is both a reality and a requirement.

In the pages ahead, I’ll reveal how naked marketing can bring your organisation into alignment with today’s powerful trends in customer engagement, and how this organic approach will lead to stronger growth and a healthier bottom line for your company.

Chapter 1

A Brief History of Advertisingand its Inevitable Decline

It was spring in New York at the height of the Roaring Twenties. Thousands of spectators lined the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue, watching a parade. A group of fashionable women in flapper dresses and bobbed hair hidden under cloche hats walked in the parade. But unlike the crowd, they were not there just to celebrate. They were part of a publicity stunt staged by a rising young public relations man named Edward Bernays. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and, having read his uncle’s work, was keen to learn whether the theories of psychology could be applied to the practice of mass marketing.

Why was Bernays involved in the Easter parade? Because the giant American Tobacco Company was having a hard time figuring out how to get more customers for its cigarettes. Since the booming of the industrial age, the problem was no longer mass-producing its products but creating more smokers.

At that time it was not acceptable for women to smoke in public. George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, realised that if he could make smoking attractive to women, he would have a vast number of new customers. A year earlier he had said, “It will be like opening a gold mine right in our front yard.” To increase the number of women smokers, Hill hired Edward Bernays to find out how to develop the potential of this market.

Bernays wanted to create a sensation. He found the perfect opportunity in the annual New York Easter Parade, a gala social event. He appropriated the term “torches of freedom,” which had been used by Abraham Arden Brill, the first psychoanalyst to practice in the United States, to describe the desire women felt to smoke in public. By linking the torch from the Statue of Liberty to women holding another torch – the cigarette – Bernays made it the clarion call of the tobacco industry. Who could be against freedom? And would the analogy work? In a carefully planned scheme that many would now say was highly cynical, Bernays hired the attractive women to march up Fifth Avenue in the Easter parade and publicly smoke their “torches of freedom.” The planted smokers were filmed and photographed. Of course, the press had already been alerted to what was going to happen in advance – by Edward Bernays.

The images of the women smoking cigarettes were splashed across every newspaper in the country and in the newsreels shown in every movie theater. It was a new form of marketing campaign that no one had ever carried out before.

And it worked brilliantly.

As reported in the Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association, in 1923 women only purchased five per cent of cigarettes sold. By 1929 the female market had increased to twelve per cent, and by 1935 women comprised over eighteen per cent of the cigarette market.

Edward Bernays became known as “the father of public relations,” and was later chosen by Life magazine as among the one hundred most influential Americans in the twentieth century.

Clearly, the power of a carefully orchestrated advertising campaign had been proven – for better or worse. The age of modern marketing had begun and soon every company had learned about mass marketing.

The advertising industry that began nearly a century earlier had now become a social and cultural force.

Let’s turn back the clock to see how it all began.

The Origins of Advertising

Meet Mr Volney B Palmer. The year is 1841. The place is Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mr Palmer is a gruff-looking man who, like many other hard-nosed businessmen of the time, is seeking a way to keep his commercial interests afloat. Among his many holdings is a small coal supply company. No doubt his product contributes to the choking haze that shrouds cities from London to San Francisco.

Volney Palmer is of interest to us for one reason: he is credited with operating the first successful advertising agency in the United States. His business plan was very simple: he bought large amounts of space in newspapers at discounted rates and then resold the space at higher rates to companies and individuals who wished to advertise a product or service.

Most of his advertisements were straightforward messages announcing the availability of a product, not unlike today’s classified ads. The few lines of text gave the name of the product, the place where you could buy it, and the price. There were a few exceptions, most notably the patent medicine ads that made outrageous claims about curing every disease known to man. But generally, an advertising agency was no more than a messenger that delivered product information from the client to the audience.