Forget all the talk of post-recession rebuilding. We are still advertising with no accountability and must now reduce our expectations
The coming nonsense is that when this recession is over, countries such as Britain should seek and find our salvation in (in what will become a buzz phrase of 2009-10) a “new Marketing model”.
Wrong. Actually we’re just stuffed. Marketing & Advertising hit a tree. There is no replacement advertising model for us to drive off in. We must bash out the dents, clear the broken glass, remove the bumper from the front wheel, and limp on as best we can. We should accommodate ourselves to that prospect
Instead, as our prosperity sinks, the Marketing gurus rhetoric will go skyward. “New challenges”, “a new vision”, “post-millennial economy”, “thinking outside the box” … “new technology” how wearisome this inspirational PowerPoint pap becomes. Already I can hear the so-called great and the good of the (failed) Marketing & Advertising community boasting of the next generation of marketing thrust.
Melancholy will be the spectacle of a range of middle-aged-to-elderly marketing & advertising throwbacks burbling about life changes and sea changes and gear changes and step changes for British Marketing. “Post-recession Britain … new age … new marketing dispensation … recalibrate … re-balance … blah, blah, blah.” Oh boy, is this nonsense going to sound wise. The riff will be that Western Marketing, like Britain’s must reinvent themselves.
Behind the curve, and banging the table as ever, they all have not yet latched on to the rhetoric of the “new economic model”. They are still
trying to kick life back into the old one.
So the talk until recently has been about “kick-starting” the old economy. This mindless attempt to return to routine is an indication either of the absence of imagination, or of panic. But as it becomes apparent even to the Marketing & Advertising community that there is to be no return to that golden decade of no hard choices and uninterrupted growth together with Top Down Management techniques that have failed miserably. Although (the argument will concede) the old rust-belt industries of the 20th century had to go, Britain turned its back on industry rather too readily. We were bedazzled by Marketing services: fool’s gold from Soho.
We need (wait for it) a new Marketing model. First, we must (argh) “rebalance” our economy. Media Agencies must seek out (key words) “a new generation” of shiny new media strengths, a second-wave advertising renaissance.
What, then, are these strengths? Our talent (runs the argument) for (key word) “innovation”; an “IT” (key word) generation; the potential of our existing (key word) “creative” agencies and (key words) “high added-value” marketing activity; and our (key words) “genius for invention”. Vital to all this will be (key words) “skills”, “training” and “education”. We should remind ourselves, too, of that inestimable resource available to our economy: English as a (key words) “world language”.
And it will all be just so much hot air. What is it, precisely, that we do so much better than any other country, althought I must admit that all the trade magazines say at one time or another that “British Advertising is the best in the world”. Whatever that means!
This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily, together with a total lack of accountability so that it took a while for the market to rumble. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed. The collapse of confidence is not irrational; it’s the correction to a long run of irrational confidence. All that stuff about the emerging Asian giants wasn’t just phrasemaking for party conference speeches. It was true. We’re falling behind. We face a mountain of debt: the difference between the life we are able to sustain and the life we were enjoying.
Marketing people, having misled the British people for so long must now explain a reduction in their standard of living. The great task facing the next British generation of Top-Down Management is to help the country to recognise and embrace its fate: that we should get poorer, and slip with as good a grace as possible into the world’s second league. Yes, there is a rebalancing required: a rebalancing of popular expectation.
Paul Ashby
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/theres-no-new-marketing-thinking-to-drive-the-economy-750956.html
Creative Thinking, Innovation, Creativity Training
