Has the internet really changed everything?
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Judie Lannon, editor of Market Leader, our quarterly marketing journal asked sceptic Paul Feldwick and evangelist Mark Sherrington to discuss the impact of the internet on her pages. Their debate appears in the latest issue, Judie summaries their discussion below and asks you all to join the debate.
Sceptic Paul Feldwick and evangelist Mark Sherrington begin this debate in the pages of the June issue of Market Leader. For visitors who haven’t read it, here’s a recap but I suggest you read the whole article, as a summary can’t do justice to the nuances in the longer piece.
Paul begins by wondering if the claims made for the social media in particular really stand up to a fundamental change in marketing. He questions the ‘new’ narrative that says now that everyone can communicate with everyone else, people ca
n’t be fooled by brand and advertising. In this narrative, transparency will lead to consumers buying better quality products and services: social media are the new ‘word of mouth’ drowning out traditional advertising. But he questions whether PR and word of mouth have really become significantly more important in consumer choice. And if that is the case, the implication seems to be that consumers are making more rational, product based decisions (rather than being conned by the old smoke and mirrors of traditional brand advertising).
He acknowledges the influence of price comparison sites (but advertising influences which are best) but wonders just how much brand related conversations go on in Facebook and Twitter. Not much, he ventures. But his most important objection is the underlying premise which is that people now are making more rational, objective buying decisions. He believes that the subjective nature of most buying decisions will always be heavily influenced by the feelings and associations gained through traditional advertising and branding.
Mark’s reply acknowledges that the fundamentals of marketing have not changed (building and sustaining reputation based on value added) but insists that the means by which goods are marketed has changed profoundly. Word of mouth and PR are not new but they were never given the importance or money they are now. He argues (with examples) that there are enough mentions of brands in social media to indicate significant influence in purchasing behaviour.
As to the rational vs emotional basis for choice, Mark believes that marketers are responsible for a false dichotomy: i.e. that badge values (for example) are emotional and functional benefits are rational. His view is that consumers do not make these distinctions and following this logic, that choices based on badge or other non-functional bases are perfectly rational choices from the consumer’s standpoint.
Finally, he feels that there is no real disagreement about the fundamentals of marketing and so wants to move the debate on to 3 areas: the way we can and will market existing goods and services; the new types of goods and services that we can market; and the actual market itself. Marketers make a mistake in believing that the internet is merely another channel. The challenge for marketers in how to achieve the same ends (added value reputation) in this new environment.
What do you think?
Posted: June 22nd, 2010 | Author: will.armstrong | Filed under: Market Leader | Tags: Mark Sherrington, Market Leader, Paul Feldwick, the marketing society | 19 Comments »
As both Paul and Mark recognise, the fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed. The question is: have customers?
Certainly they have access to more information than ever before. They have more of a voice – which is amplified by social media. And they are more cynical (with good reason).
But some things haven’t changed. Buying decisions are still driven primarily by emotion (even in B2B) – albeit backed up by rational justification. Customers, for the most part, do not care about the companies they buy from. And there is still a need to communicate compelling ideas and messages.
Social media is one way of doing this. But only one. And one that has yet to prove greater effectiveness than many other channels (both digital and traditional). While a Cluetrain view of the world says it is all about the conversation, many customers simply do not want a conversation with those they buy from. They do, however, need compelling points of differentiation (emotional and rational) when they come to make a purchase decision.
Of course it is a false dichotomy to say we must choose either the traditional or the social – the world is far more interesting than that. However, we should all take a long hard look at any new or emerging technique before being swept up by the hype.
Above there are some very solid observations, distilling it to two key changes though: the internet has created (real-time) connections that weren’t before and those connections leave a permanent (data) trail.
We need to work with those thoughts – and their impact on expectations – in mind.
Firstly, Jason and Gareth, thanks for the comments. this exercise only gets interesting as more people with a point of view contribute. Jason asks whether consumers (i.e. people) have changed. Yes they have – since opposable thumbs and the stone age we have developed as humans through our interaction with technology. The bigger the technology change the bigger the effect on society – and this one is the biggest yet in terms of the speed, scale and (low) cost. Moving from stores to self-service supermarkets transformed marketing – the internet as a global exchange of anything from goods to ideas must surely make an even bigger change to marketing. The internet is totally transforming both the purchase decision process and the decisions themselves – I have just bought a camera, a watch and a car. In every case how I bought and what I bought was changed by the internet even though none were actually bought on-line. Gareth makes a very telling point about data trails – I agree this is where we need to focus attention. We are only scratching at the surface of the implications of this. Finally still don’t agree with the distinction between emotions and rationality in decision making. We seek to make good decisions through a combination of genetic programming (Dawkins), thin-slicing (Gladwell and all the semioticians) and social copying (Mark Earls). We need to understand these better, Emotion vs Rationality is a distraction and not so relevant to this debate I think. We make better decisions if we have all the facts & information (and trusted sources) available to us. We now have this to an unprecedented degree.
Mark’s point about the internet not being just another channel but the subversive engine of change is significant Arthur Koestler wrote widely about creativity and somewhere in his writings is the observation that there are periods in history when forces come together to erupt in waves of new thinking that challenge prevailing orthodoxies .We are living through one of these highly creative periods. Just to take one area, market research – the source of what we know about consumers. The industry has remained largely unchanged for decades with, admittedly, much argument but only within the industry and often of a rather technical nature. The very basis of market research is now being challenged from a number of directions: most directly (and competitively) from analysis of the masses of consumer material on the internet .But more significantly, the internet and social media have contributed to new theories revealing how people think and behave which pose a direct challenge to the ways traditional market research is conducted. Furthermore, and related to this, innovation through co-creation and other uses of online communities challenge not only the way research is conducted but the way companies are structured to incorporate consumers into the innovation process. (See article describing Lego’s use of brand communities in this issue of Market Leader.). None of this changes the objectives of marketing but very definitely changes the means by which we do it.
Thank you Jason for mentioning The Cluetrain Manifesto. That book has a lot to answer for. On the one hand, it now looks incredibly far sighted: considering it came out in 1999, before Facebook or Twitter or Wikipedia, when even Google was in its infancy, and US Broadband penetration way under 10%, it asserted profound and revolutionary consequences from the advent of what we didn’t yet know as ‘Web 2.0′. But too many commentators seem to have taken the Cluetrain position as gospel when it was, at best, inspired speculation and at worst woolly dreaming. Consider Thesis 74: ‘We are immune to advertising. Forget it’. More than a decade on, can we see hard evidence of this? Leaving aside the use of the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘you’ by the Cluetrain authors – worth a thesis in itself – this hardly fits with Binet and Field’s analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Awards, or with my own naive observations. Mark, I just bought a car too, and like you, I used the web to find out about it and its competitors. It made life much easier and I didn’t have to go out and buy What Car magazine and as I don’t go to the office everyday any more I don’t have so many people to talk about cars with round the coffee machine (sob). To that extent, it changed my behaviour. But I first saw the car in a car park: then I saw one advertised in the local paper: then I test drove it: then my sister in law said it was her dream car: and at the end of the day I really would much rather have had a Mercedes than a Vauxhall. So for me it doesn’t really matter which of these interactions happened on or offline – at the end of the day my decision process didn’t feel much different from when I bought a Honda Accord thirty years ago. I too distrust the ‘rational – emotional’ dichotomy in analysing decisions, but I don’t think the role that information plays in such choices has been fundamentally changed by the fact that certain types of information are just more available and easy to get.
Look to brain researcher Antonio Damasio and his work as well as the research using fMRI and the growing study of behavioral economics. It appears there is no clear rift between emotional and rational. tudies of brain injuries by Damaso and others point to the link between emotions and the ability to make decisions: those with brain injuries that damaged the prefontal cortex portion that governs emotions, also rendered the injured decision-challenged, leading Damasio to conclude there is no ability to decide without emotions. We also know from Charles Lord’s work with “confirmation bias” that no amount of rational fact-piling will unseat a bias held in the emotional nooks of the brain.
Selling is a universal human activity which I grant has been with us long enough not to change very fast. Marketing is different since it is a relatively recent construct. It interests me that mass selling developed in the 19th and 20th centuries long before Phil Kotler and his generation turned marketing into a quasi-science. Marketing presupposes centralisation of production, specialisation, management of process and crucially mass distribution and mass communication. Because of the distance between manufacturers and their markets. The arrival of the internet has dissolved that distance giving marketers direct access to customers and making it possible for customers to search out products. This changes the role of mass communication and effectively decentres it. It isn’t of course the end of it any more than TV finished off radio or radio print.
If I can use a military metaphor (which seems appropriate since marketing discourse is impossible without the use of military words – a good indicator of how much of a construct it is). On the Western Front a wing of Camels made a dozen men much more productive than a platoon in the trenches. Since then we have taken it for granted that dominance in the air gives supremacy on the ground. A century later the Taliban an irregular force are capable of holding their own against the most best resourced forces in the world with unassailable airpower. Air power which kills as many civilians as combatants. The key to future strategy would appear to lie in the ability to manage the terrain and local inhabitants which you can’t do from a plane. The rise and decentring of mass communications seems to me to follow the same arc as that of airpower. Paul you will accuse me of arguing from analogy and of course I am! But I think there are interesting parallels:
1/ Mass WOM has not succeeded mass communications. That trivialises the role of word of mouth before the arrival of the internet and over-eggs it subsequently. The significant change is that the circle of influence driving trial and purchase has grown significantly smaller. Opinion formers haven’t replaced newspapers – you can get all the advice you want from your online network – its like that old Silentnight ad where the glass of wine was balanced on the mattress and didn’t fall over when the presenter sat on it because each cell worked separately from the rest. The challenge for the mass communicator is to aggregate enough of an audience and to show how mass communications is impacting on all those individual cells. Oh for an overnight omnibus to cut the Gordian knot.
2/ People aren’t talking about brands any more than they used to – but the whole point of a brand is being a shorthand of cultural meanings which helps people to buy products – so those values ARE being discussed in thousands of forums – and resent brands forcing their way in if they have nothing else to contribute except to say Buy me! So marketers have never had so many open doors to listen and start conversations which are a hairsbreadth away from the brand word. But that’s the trouble – too few marketers and too many open doors.
3/ Is there any more rational decision making thanks to all this information and interaction? Certainly not. Emotions are useful because they help us make decisions faster which is why I am able to type this instead of still being stuck in the supermarket stressing out in front of the shelves (or consulting my wife with a mobile jammed against my ear). The number of influences shaping my emotionally driven decision making have mushroomed. But hang on: Isn’t the Tripvisor sample is contradicting itself? 5 for that hotel 5 against and the rest in the middle. Tell you what I’ll read a few and make my decision then. But at least I’m not sitting in the high street blinking at the travel agent wondering how independent she is. So I think decision making is more complex – even if we don’t have time to read everything. I don’t share Mark’s confidence in rationality.
4/ Where is market research? Having to come very rapidly out of orbit and to go to ground where the conversations are happening. The beautiful things about customer behaviour is the way you can understand it by getting up close to it and how well it travels when you universalise it. We may not be doing it with focus groups in 10 years time but we will still be eyeballing customers. And listening closely. Because human experience scales up and across.
Where were we? Yes has the internet changed everything? Yes it has. But it’s a modulation not a revolution. And if it were suddenly removed the offline world could not replicate the nature of the consumer decision support that it has enabled. So it is more than just a channel. Notice also that a third of the UK population are still not on the internet. Are they influenced by it? Of course they are.
Amusing to watch great minds wrestling with this issue. The fact that the internet has not changed everything is unarguable. That is has changed some things is equally unarguable. How much you think it has changed probably depends on whether you earn your reputation in traditional or new media.
Setting that aside, the discussion seems to be driven by whether you adopt a positivist philosophical perspective on the world (that everything is explainable by laws) or a constructivist view (that everything is influenced by the individual). In the latter view EVERYTHING becomes an opportunity for dramatic change, from the internet to the tube card to the petrol pump nozzle ad. In the former view, all things have to earn their place in the ordered hierarchy of effects. But a more valid philosophy is Critical Realism, which argues that a lot of what drives the world simply cannot be perceived or measured. The myriad influences that drove Paul to choose the Mercedes brand include not just those he mentioned but also the huge number of hoardings and print ads and article references and other cars on the road and in films and on the racing track which he has been Low Attention Processing since he was about six years old. To shift such deeply entrenched un-measurable emotional attitudes even slightly requires a medium with some STATUS, and the internet (much less social media) frankly does not yet have that status, and I personally think may never have that status. TV advertising, for all we try to ignore it, does have status, and that’s why it continues to exert conscious and subconscious influence on our behaviour.
Marketing principals haven’t changed because of the internet, nor have people – well arguably no more than they change over time anyway.
But, by hugely multiplying transparency and connectivity, the internet has maybe revealed unappreciated behaviours and false marketing assumptions.
Sightings of the emperor’s new clothes now abound.
The revolutionary bit
What is it that the Internet has fundamentally changed? The answer, I think, can be summed up in the phase “transaction costs”. Our ability to send combinations of ones and zeros around the world at very low cost fundamentally changes the way service businesses (in practice most businesses) deal with people.
With low cost broadband and all you can eat mobile tariffs we can gets things right here right now and on the move. It is a global revolution and transaction costs are getting cheaper all the time
People (and what they want from brands) don’t fundamentally change but that misses the point.
Service businesses have to execute differently-joining up communication platforms and investing in technology to keep up. Without good execution all those unchanging high principles of branding- big ideas, brand promises, consumer insights- are but naught. “Every little helps” is both a statement of a brands higher purpose and a promise that all the detailed day to execution will be spot on. Without the latter the former is valueless. The ability to deal with people differently at very low cost enables new functions- most notably the way in which innovation happens through co- creation and open source. And not just mean software is developed- it can also be about household products-see P&Gs connect and develop program- https://secure3.verticali.net/pg-connection-portal/ctx/noauth/PortalHome.do
The bit that hasn’t really changed
What about people and their relationships with brands? The idea that consumers are somehow now much more confident and empowered seems to me to have very shallow roots. Activist consumers are still a minority yet the speed and scale of their impact has fundamentally changed through rock bottom transaction costs-people can now easily publish (blogs/tweets/forums) and self organize (social media platforms/email). And this does fundamentally change how service brands deal with people-much more open, transparent and responsive than ever before. But have we as consumers really changed?
We seem to be in state of permanent consumer adolescence-superficially very confident and bolshie, but scratch the surface and we are as insecure and irrational as ever. We look confident when doing simple things-like finding a cheap flight or buying a DVD online or Googling to find out what is on at the cinema tonight and which films are worth seeing. But give us something more difficult and we revert to type and seek the guidance of brands and the reassurance of others. Barry Schwarz in the Paradox of Choice has shown that we cant really cope with much choice and behavioural psychologists have shown that we are predictably irrational and prone to do things because, well, it’s what other people do and so therefore it’s probably Ok.
This last observation on human behaviour more than anything else explains why mass advertising will never go way. True, the Internet does promise ever-greater efficiency and effectiveness in targeting- a seeming apotheosis of the early CRM missionary’s ideas.
But here’s the thing. The “wastage” of mass advertising is a big part of what makes it effective. It gives public affirmation of the choices that we herding animals make. Agencies will continue to create “the poster”- the cavemen did and we are sure to be putting them up (electronically) in a hundred years time.
Well, I feel like the toy dog in the car back window – nodding along happily at all these excellent contributions. Don’t know where to start – and only want to encourage more of the same. I think we are getting somewhere. I will, for the moment, just share one observation which I make with some satisfaction since I think this is long overdue in marketing. Penetrating this debate – not whether there is change but how much and with what consequences – has required us to bring in perspectives on human and social behaviour and how the brain works. Let’s not be scared off this for fear of appearing too high brow. Brands are heuristics, communication works in the context of semiotics, emotions are genetically programmed ways to combine heuristics and semiotics to allow us to make rational decisions, copying is more powerful than opinion leaders, the brain stores, retrieves and applies information in complex ways we are only just beginning to understand (but which relate to all of this). When the world was simple we used simple constructs – the speed, transparency and inter-connectedness of the internet requires us to look deeper. Keep it coming. Maybe marketing will become more than a quasi science? Maybe it will become more constructive as an allocator of scarce resources? Maybe the internet has been the catalyst?
And maybe the internet will go on being a sideshow that distracts too many people from from other things that are probably more important for marketers to understand. Two bits of data that came my way in the last week : only 6% of brand conversations take place online (Thinkbox); only 12% of Twitter posts mention brands, and most of those are of Twitter itself (AdAge). Maybe we should turn the computer off and look out the window more often. By the way, when was the world ever ’simple’? And on what measure is it less so now than it was?
Great debate and some sound points here all round the table.
Paul’s cautious tone in the face of the extreme claims of Cluetrain fans is I feel appropriate (for example it’s all too easy to maintain that “TV is dead” or similar when the data suggests that tvviewing in many audiences is stable or actually growing, albeit across a different combination of broadcast platforms and times than those that advertisers are used to monitoring). It’s not that one set of marketing tools is being made redundant by another, merely added to and evolved.
That said, there are structural changes being brought to markets (the late CK Prahalad’s pacemaker manufacturer example is still a great example – prior to the internet, this kind of business could get away with focusing its marketing efforts on Health Authority purchasers and maybe their senior Surgeons; now every patient seems to have googled the symptoms before they get anywhere near a specialist).
However, I suspect where Mark’s really on the right track is in pointing out that we’re being forced to adjust our view of people and marketing and how they work. For example observing how people behave when they are highly connected to each other across “mutter and Facetube” and other platforms is very revealing and is widely reflected in the real world, too.
Some of this is stuff we didn’t see before (a lot of the conversations that people have with each other weren’t visible before the arrival of the web because were spoken and not written). As is suggested, Bernbach (for example) talked about word-of-mouth as being really important in shaping consumer behaviour long ago.
As far as this point is concerned, perhaps what the internet is doing is helping us remember these other tools that TV advertising had allowed us to ignore.
But I think Mark is right to say that the internet is bringing more fundamental changes to Marketing by challenging how we think about human behavior and how it is shaped: the widespread and rapid adoption of these fundamentally connective technologies is itself testimony to the social side of human nature and the more marketing gets to grips with the datastream being generated by it, the clearer the importance of the social context within which almost all the decisions we marketers try to influence are rooted.
Indeed, the behavioural science of folk like Nowak, Salganik, Watts, Ormerod and Bentley points us toward a fundamental challenge of the notion of individual “consumers” (or whatever you call them) making decisions on their own in sweet isolation. (NB This is another reason why the old emotional/rational debate is missing the point – it’s between people that we have to look not inside their individual hearts or minds).
There are independent decisions being made in every market but assuming that this is the default seems a blatant error – whether the behaviour is online or offline. Most of our lives are spent in a context which largely consists of other people (exclusion is a serious punishment in every human society – a death sentance in some) and we outsource much of the cognitive load of the practical side of things in our lives to those who surround us. This of course includes what to choose in a world where there are lots of equally good choices – like a supermarket.
Incidentally, the idea that the internet is encouraging more better (rational?) product choices based on stripping out the marketing “spin” is I think demonstrably wrong: if anything the internet is helping us see other people’s choices more clearly – in what we buy, what we feel and (for what it’s worth) what we think. We were always a social creature who did what those around them do, but the internet is encouraging us to be more so and more often.
So for me, the tactics and tools of marketing remain
the same, it’s the map of the most important thing in marketing – the consumer – that is being re-written (and not in the easy emotional/rational way as suggested).
Good stuff!
Flipping back a few posts to Robert Heath’s comments about STATUS: for many people, (especially those who have grown up with it; and ESPECIALLY those who are building careers by having the hang of it better than us oldies) – the internet has awesome status.
They believe, with a quasi-religious fervour, that it will change the world, brands, marketing, ad agencies, – you name it. And their belief will prevail – if only because it is quasi-religious and all those supposedly “in charge” of the ad industry are desperate for anything that will get us out of the tailspin of declining quality and revenue that is all too familiar.
And with the persuasion industry encouraging them, the public will come round to accepting it – or at least all of the stuff that will flow from it. Because they really don’t care. Paul commented above on the relative importance of looking out the window. I don’t think that most of the people we are trying to influence need to be told – it is those whose lives (or next pay rises) depend on “influencing” them who are glued to the screen. But, with time, the prophecies will become self-fulfilling.
But by then there will be a new generation of teenagers desperate to rebel against whatever is the done thing.
And so the world turns…………
At last a decent debate and nice stats Paul btw – thanks for sharing those.
I think that we tend to view the world through the lens of our profession and consequently there will always be an uneasy tension between those whose livelihoods depend on selling the benefits of brand conversations in social spaces and those for whom the brand film (in whatever format) is the most potent force in creating propensity to purchase. Both will produce beguiling facts to support its own cosmography in the same way that mothers of mass-murderers will always deny their child could be capable of socially unacceptable behavior.
The Cluetrain Manifesto was partly correct but precisely wrong – so was McLuhan of course and so looking backwards will not help us necessarily to understand the present because we are changed by our knowledge of the world rather than the technology that transports it (opposable thumbs excepted). We are being changed daily as our knowledge (or the access to) expands exponentially.
Marketing will never be more than a quasi-science IMHO – why should it – and what’s wrong with it just the way it is? Why do we need to make it full fat ’science’ at all? I am not sure I understand this part of the debate. It is a marrying of the magic and logic and no-one has worked out exactly which bit makes the difference – anyone know any different?
On the bigger question here – the ‘internet’ is not separable from people and process and all things change always. I agree that there are heuristics at work here and totally agree with Julian about emotions, semiotics and copying. However, it is incorrect to apply one typology of human behavior in the online spaces to every category and demographic as this is about distribution and penetration. Twitter has less than 4% penetration in the UK so hardly a proxy to build a media/PR strategy on (as some incompetents are doing) – and especially for the over 60s as an example.
Perhaps only when internet penetration in China hits 50% (predicted in 2013) can we see just how much influence the internet has/is having on us as human beings and how we are influenced by the added value that Mark talks about from a marketing perspective – but it will be through a political, economic and environmental lens I suspect.
A bit of a false dichotomy here, surely?
For the whole argument contains a dangerous assumption: that any increase in the importance of online media must inevitably signify a *fall* in the importance of conventional media.
Why?
It is perfectly possible – perhaps even likely – that as online media grow in importance, the power and importance of accompanying offline media will grow as well.
For a cute example of how a seemingly logical assumption – in this case that better online marketing reduces the need for offline marketing – can be dangerously wrong, have a look at a parallel involving coal and steam engines. It’s called the Jevons paradox and it is explained here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Put another way, and using 1920s language: if your door-to-door salesmen suddenly become twice as effective at targeting prospects, the return you enjoy from advertising your product should increase not fall. Hence you should advertise more not less.
This week’s Observer ran a relevant article to this debate, “The internet: is it changing the way we think?” It draws on ‘The Shallows’ where Nicholas Carr argues that our deepening dependence on networking technology is changing not only the way we think, but also the structure of our brains. Journalist, John Naughton and people like Ed Bullmore, professor of psychiatry at the University of Cambridge and Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at the University of Oxford all chip into the discussion.Read it in full here http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/15/internet-brain-neuroscience-debate
Some more excellent contributions – thanks Elen for the Guardian article, well worth a read. Not only is the internet changing society and marketing it is changing our brain, it would appear. At the very least it is changing the way we access and process information/knowledge according to the experts. We’re not just Twittering we are becoming twitter-brained apparently. Is it better to learn things or learn how to look them up? Probably the former but the latter is the way we are heading – yes, Paul the world did used to be simpler because we only got to see a tiny part of it. So now I have to look things up (found out today that the next OED will not be printed, it will only be availalbe on-line)
By the way Paul I actually read the full report on Twitter (by 360i to give them credit). Beware the sound bite. ‘Only’ 12% of tweets reference brands and yes a big chunk of these are other social network brands. But a bigger chunk are other brands in entertainment, cars, cameras, phones and restaurants. Furthermore did you notice the absolute numbers. Even if only 1% of brand tweets relate (directly or indirectly) to the industry you work in that is 100,000 a day/3 million a month (growing exponentially). And that is just Twitter, what about Facetube and the blogs. There are tools, by the way, that allow you to identify & evaluate any reference to any on-line comment on your brand (or any subject) from over 35 billion web pages every day. Beats a few focus groups I would say.
Anyway, let me recap on where I think we have got to. Purpose of marketing pretty much unchanged but massive changes to the processes and tools. Marketing is essentially a study of society and human choice. “Communication technology shapes and reshapes society” according to the experts quoted in the Guardian article. Glad we’re agreed on that. I too miss the days when I gathered, with my chums, to hear the latest news from the Town Crier or gathered around the camp fire to learn about history but we have to move with the times.
Marketing is also about markets (hence the name) and the internet has evolved many existing ones and created many thousand new ones that would have been impossible without the technology. Who knows maybe nothing has changed in the marketing of Persil but it has in software.
Copying and heuristics lie at the heart of human development – internet has revolutionized both
In fact everything has changed because we have changed. What I really like about all this is that it has moved the discussion on to consideration of society and the brain and how they work. Yes, there is magic and logic but only because we lack logic. I too love the magic, Christmas was more fun when I believed in Santa, but sadly we grow up. If as marketers we are interested in making money by influencing choice it helps if we know more about how people and communities tick. I don’t really care whether marketing gets acknowledged as a science but I care that it gets better/more efficient because it influences the deployment of scarce resources. and I think science, logic versus magic, helps it get better.
Ed Bullmore reckons the internet increasingly resembles a human brain and that we can learn from it. I agree. In fact I think it is a human brain and not just ‘a global prosthesis for our collective memory” as he describes it. I agree this is scary. so is this. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, far from being embarrassed by the leaking of personal data from his brainchild actually wants all the information to be public. He believes the world would be a better place if we had no secrets. If we all knew what we all thought we’d behave better goes the argument. We are some way off that as we are some way off marketers being able to understand and manipulate the human brain. But as the old quote goes, “When someone points at the moon only the fool looks at the finger”. The internet is a lot more than just a new media. And marketing feels a lot different to the way it did a few decades ago because the world feels a lot different. Because we are a lot different.
One of the most interesting things about the internet is how it helps us to rediscover and reinvent storytelling as a tool of influence. By this i mean not the experience of stories as private thing-like watching a 30 second ad alone- but as a social act, an act of sharing.
Going right back this is the way stories were before we had any kind of mass media or even printed matter. Until Guttenberg there were few Bibles so stories were shared,declaimed repeated and transformed in the retelling and reinterpretation.
The reason this is worth remembering is that when it comes to effectiveness awards The Christian Church, the Buddha and Islam may have a thing or two to teach us. With religious stories we learnt about norms and we learn about what to copy.
(which seems to me to chime with Marks Earl’s insight that we are social animals first and foremost)
The best stories are also incomplete and leave us space to participate and extend through our own imaginations.
The best ads were always like this-
Think of the original Gold Blend couple
It all started innocently with a simple request to borrow some coffee from a neighbour, and continued with a series of increasingly arch conversations. All the time, in our torrid imaginations, we were wondering will they wont they? It was a briefly told story in a series of 40 second commercials- not much space compared with an episode of East Enders- but we filled in the gaps in the story.
Clearly the internet offers many new opportunities to tell stories in different ways. Obviously,
You tube and the like mean you can tell your story in 3 minutes rather than 30 seconds but most of these these short film stories are unsatisfactory because they are “too complete” for us to participate. We might be impressed we might even share them but most do not stir us.
But when it comes to gaming or a story told in tweets you have to be the master of incompleteness. The web seethes with fragments of stories-the powerful ones are those that we are drawn to participate in and complete. To quote Faris Yacob it is about “ideas that create content rather than ideas that are content” ( Although i hate the word content-it is a bit like walking into a restaurants and requesting “some protein and carbohydrate”-i think Faris really means stories)