Where have we seen marketing experts fail? Well, where do you want to start? How about in the world of high finance, where thousands of bankers and economists, in the public as well as private sector, spectacularly failed to predict what in retrospect looked like a catastrophe waiting to happen? And a catastrophe, moreover, that owed nothing to bad luck or "an act of God", but was unwittingly wrought by Marketing financiers themselves.
Hell hath no fury like a Marketing/Advertising expert scorned. Consider the scenario. These are people who dedicate their waking hours to the gathering of knowledge in their chosen subject. They are all,
in their little niches, masterminds. And as their expertise grows, so does their arrogance. Why not? Their specialist areas may be tiny, but inside those mini-jungles they are mighty beasts. You cross or contradict them at your peril. They know best. Their word is law! But then something totally unexpected pops out of the undergrowth and bites them on their pompous backsides. They are thrown off balance. They lose their bearings in the jungle they thought they knew so well. What's worse, everyone has noticed. The press is laughing, or screaming for blood. After all, aren't experts supposed to predict imminent problems in their respective fields, and take steps to avert disasters — or at least to warn the rest of us? If they can't do that, what's the point of them?
But I'm ready to sum up 2009 now. It's the Year When the Marketing Experts Lost the Plot. And with it, status and credibility. I'll go farther. This is the year in which the 21st century really started. But more of that later.
Where have we seen marketing experts fail? Well, where do you want to start? How about in the world of high finance, where thousands of bankers and economists, in the public as well as private sector, spectacularly failed to predict what in retrospect looked like a catastrophe waiting to happen? And a catastrophe, moreover, that owed nothing to bad luck or "an act of God", but was unwittingly wrought by Marketing financiers themselves.
Or how about in the Internet and Social Media? Having completely ruined a perfectly good media service by not understanding anything to do with the process of communication and accountability, they are now rushing heedlessly into Social Media! And this despite the mounting evidence that people go onto the Internet to get away from advertising! It’s the first era to value mass mediocrity above individual genius
A trivial matter? Perhaps. Yet as any marketing critic will tell you, usually through gritted teeth, the Social Media/Twitter Syndrome is typical of what's going on right across the marketing/advertising world. "Give the majority what it wants" is now the overriding mantra in all the media, especially on TV. It far outweighs notions of excellence, innovation or adventure. Experts are ridiculed as elitist or "out of touch". Teenage bloggers get as much attention and respect as learned scholars. Quality is counted only in ratings or box-office takings. A kiddy just out of University has as much authority as Editors on the subject of media and its suitability as an advertising medium. We have far too many Chiefs and almost no Indians!
Far more than 9/11, or the financial meltdown, or the rise and rise of China, the decline and fall of the marketing/advertising expert in public esteem strikes me as the most significant aspect in which the 21st century thus far differs from the 20th. Fifty years ago, people generally felt that only by specializing —' fragmenting business, cultural and intellectual life into a million sub-sects of a thousand different disciplines — could humanity keep tabs on an increasingly mind-boggling world. The days when a reasonably bright, curious adult could grasp and contextualise every new complexity in science, culture, politics, exploration and medicine as well as marketing and advertising were thought long past. Hence the phrase "Renaissance Man". The only way that humanity could progress, it was believed, was leadership by experts.
How radically that has changed! The internee has been the prime driving force, spreading the pathetic illusion that all knowledge (and therefore all wisdom) is accessible to everybody. But it's not the only one. Almost as strong is the new belief that everyone's opinion, on every subject, is equally valid — whether that opinion is well informed or crassly ignorant. Deference to authority is dead, even where that authority is based on a lifetime of marketing or advertising experience.
I'm all for democracy and the empowerment of ordinary people. But there must be limits. How long before surgeons have to seek an audience-vote from TV viewers on which operating procedure to use? Or airline pilots have to take a straw poll among passengers on whether they should use the north or south runway at airports? High-and-mighty experts must be kept in check. But the 21st century is in danger of being the first era in history to value mass, mediocrity and water-cooler chitchat over individual geniuses, expertise, courage and leadership.
Yes, the marketing experts sometimes get things badly, wrong. There are thousands of dazed former Marketing Experts wandering aimlessly round the City who can attest to that. But if we stop trusting people who are wiser and better informed than us, the world will regress to the Dark Ages. We have to give the experts another chance.
