Roblog

Amy Kean on the samey language of modern advertising:

“The word ‘reimagine’ has crept into the advertising space in tandem with the growing number of brands hiring management consultants to manage their journeys into the future. We’re being sold shoes, reimagined. Laptops, reimagined. Teabags, reimagined. Cars, reimagined. And every single one of them is only slightly different.

“The word ‘reimagine’ is a tactic. It’s grandiose waffle (which is why management consultants love it). A meaningless word. Style over substance. A preference for what sounds good, versus what actually says something. So why is everyone doing it?”

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JP Castlin, whose Strategy in Praxis newsletter is well worth a subscribe, explains the Ansoff Matrix, something I’ve always been fond of. But he also eloquently explains its limitations.

Hope is not lost for the Ansoff Matrix – it can still be useful – but perhaps needs to be put into a broader context:

“Given its limitations, then, the best way to use the Ansoff matrix is together with a contextual understanding of the business and an already set strategic aspiration… it is a good way of visualizing what one can do – but despite Ansoff’s best efforts and Kotler’s claims to the contrary, it tells us little about what one should do or why.”

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Michael Lorenzos hopefully ends one of the more tedious and intractable debates within marketing: the conflict between brand and performance marketing.

Brand marketers see performance activity as cheap, short-termist and diluting of the brand; performance marketers see brand activity as ineffective, fluffy, and imposing of unnecessary constraints on creative.

Lorenzos argues the sensible middle ground: that the dichotomy is a false one. Brand building helps drive sales and generally makes performance marketing perform better. Performance marketing builds brand associations. He ends with some great advice for both camps, and for the CMOs who are tasked with wrestling them into some kind of cooperation. #

Scott Galloway takes on “buy now, pay later” schemes (like Klarna) that have taken over ecommerce in recent years.

These services have proliferated partly by capitalising on young people’s fear of debt and presenting themselves as being somehow different:

“Their attraction to BNPL coincides with an aversion to banks and the credit they offer. This is a generation that came of age just before or in the wake of the Great Recession, a global economic crisis precipitated by… way too much credit. Young people love BNPL because, according to the former director of Afterpay, the vast majority of them ‘don’t want to be on credit.’”

But whichever way you cut it, these services are debt – and they’re driving young people to spend money they don’t have and to get into a cycle of incurring punitive late fees. #

James Roach explains why the marketing funnel is a less than useful concept: it doesn’t reflect the reality of purchase journeys, which are messy and non-linear and highly individual.

The alternative that Roach suggests is James Hankins’s Hexagon model, which will be food for thought for any marketeer who hasn’t yet encountered it. #

Martin Weigel, Head of Planning at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, writes an inspiring manifesto on the need for those of us who work in marketing to escape our bubbles, reconnect with real people, staff our organisations more representatively, and rediscover our ability to talk to a broad spectrum of society.

“And so it is that – privileged, unrepresentative, disconnected and with an overinflated sense of its understanding and common values – marketing and advertising professionals have come to rely on the sweeping platitudes of ‘Millennials’ and ‘Gen Z’, happy to believe that people born within certain years are all the same, happy by implication to reject the concept of segmentation and of consumers holding different perceptions and experiences, and happy to believe that some kind of powerful, magical invisible force is at work that determines that people who are born in the same year will all have exactly the same opinions and attitudes.”

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