AI-generated image
Time was when marketing was confined to the bazaar. Goods and services were sold in one-to-one transactions between a buyer and a seller. More often than not, the buyer and the seller had a relationship, if not of trust, then at least of familiarity.
Then, the eras of mass manufacturing and mass media dawned. After World War II, the industrial age shifted into high gear, leading to a proliferation of products and services. The prosperous 1950s and 60s, driven by the economic boom in the USA, marked the birth of the consumer era.
Marketing underwent a significant transformation, shifting from the traditional model of building one-to-one relationships to a new era of mediated one-to-many brand-building. Modern media made this shift possible, revolutionizing how mass audiences could be reached.
Marketing and media forged a symbiotic relationship, each playing a crucial role in the other’s success. With its ability to attract and retain audiences, media provided the platform for marketing to communicate its messages. In turn, through advertising, marketing financed the accumulation of these audiences, ensuring the continued viability of media.
In the initial days of mass media marketing, brands were the pegs through which information about the product or service was conveyed. In the early days of the consumer age, many products and services had differentiated features, and advertising was then the art of conveying unique selling propositions (USPs) memorably.
A few decades into the consumer age, as categories matured, competition heated up, investment flowed into consumer businesses, contract manufacturing emerged, and brands in many categories didn’t have differentiating features to hang their stories.
Brands morphed away from information providers to signalers of personas and lifestyles. For example, the Nike user was a never-say-die enthusiast, while the Adidas guy strived for perfection.
Brands’ dependence on mass media increased. Signaling a persona or a lifestyle on mass media allowed the entire market–loyal users of your brand, potential users of your brand, and, as importantly, loyal users of your competition–to know what your brand stands for. Brand equity was built on what the brand stood for and what it did not. The acceptance among loyal users complimented the rejection by the faithful users of the other brand. Pepsi’s equity depended not just on its persona but as much of the persona of Coke.
While mass media might have been primarily financed by marketing, its importance went well beyond its role as a vehicle for advertising.
In its heyday, mass media offered society a shared cultural arena that builds societal cohesion. Most religiously read the same one or two newspapers in the morning covering the same news, watched the same prime-time TV programs and went to the same movies.
The arrival of Facebook and the subsequent social media juggernaut fractured this cohesion. Today, the average person gets his information, views, entertainment, and cultural content from various social media and OTT sources that may have little in common with those in his family, his colleagues, or his neighbors. The cohort that shares his principal information, entertainment, and cultural sources is not a community in the traditional sense – they might not reside in the same city or even country, they might not share the same profession or educational level, and they may not be even in the same age group. The only thing they have in common is the echo chamber of partisan views and attitudes they share. They are the modern tribe – divorced from the shared everyday space and civic responsibility that defined traditional communities.
This fracturing of societal cohesion has also fractured the rationale that drives modern brand-building.
The core function of a brand as a widely accepted signal of a persona or a lifestyle is fast losing its potency, mainly because, in post-modern society, there is little that is widely accepted. In an era when even facts have alternate facts, what chance does a brand have as a widely accepted symbol?
In light of failing mass media, brands have shifted their marketing resources to new media. However, the paradigm that drives their brand-building effort remains the same as in the modern era. By and large, they are yet to find a new paradigm that better suits the changed reality.
Lately, I have heard murmurs from the marketing fraternity that perhaps digital and social media are better suited to “performance marketing” (another name for baiting someone to click on a link) than brand-building. And they must reweigh their mass media spending to strengthen their brands.
Instead, the new reality calls for re-examining the very purpose of brands. Instead of brands being broad-based signalers of lifestyle or persona to a market, brands in the emerging new marketing era become builders of permission-driven one-to-one relationships with their consumers. Like the shopkeepers and the shoppers of the bazaar of the old days, a brand and its consumers must develop an interactive relationship of trust and constantly deepening understanding of each other.
With the maturing of Big Data, a digital-immersed consumer, e-commerce, and the economies of scale of cloud computing, marketing can today shift to a paradigm where a brand can build and nurture a one-to-one relationship with consumers at scale.
Given my current obsession with AI, as marketing reverts to building one-to-one relationships, the day is close when the one-to-one relationship will be between the brand’s AI avatar and the consumer’s AI avatar, as I have written in many of my MxM columns, starting with the first one.
Marketers at the cutting edge, including many D2C start-ups, have started working on this new paradigm.
Post-modern marketing could address another shift. The younger generation of consumers – Gen Z and, over the next decade, the Alphas (those born after 2010) – are opposed to marketing messages touting lifestyles and personas and, simultaneously, intensely devoted to a chosen cause. Can tomorrow’s brands be built based on a cause it espouses, not just in communication terms but through on-the-ground action? An exciting area to ponder in a MxMIndia column to come?