New Rules For A New Era
In a radically altered media landscape, it's time to come up with some new solutions.
Over the past few months, my columns have focused on some of the smaller issues in retailing — interesting new stores, the identification of trends, reviews of technology — but now here comes a big issue: the death of the marketing as we know it.
For the past 100 years or so, marketers have operated based on a simple set of rules of engagement with consumers, but now those rules are changing radically.
Rule No. 1: The implicit trade of free or cheap content (TV, newspapers and traditional radio) in exchange for the viewing of advertising. Historically, people have been willing to live with this trade-off.
Rule No. 2: Traditional marketing was built on trickery. The phrase “We will be right back after these messages” implied that the media would deliver the goods for viewers as long as they watched the ads. The assumption was that consumers didn't want to watch ads, but that they could be cajoled into unwilling cooperation.
Rule No. 3: Mass marketing was bigger and better than targeted marketing. The bigger the marketing plan, the thinking went, the bigger the prize. Targeted marketing was for small, niche brands and companies that, for whatever reason, couldn't compete with the big boys.
Rule No. 4: The fundamental job of the creative team was to find the single great, powerful and impactful message that changed consumers' minds, like “Coke is the Real Thing” or Nike's “Just Do It.”
Rule No. 5: A marketer's job was to balance advertising and promotional efforts. The idea was that advertising was good, that it built brand equity and enhanced the value of a brand, while promotion was, at best, a mixed blessing, delivering this year's volume at the cost of potentially damaging the price you could demand and the brand equity you were building.
In 2011, it seems to me that these rules simply don't work anymore, due to a combination of evolving consumer behavior and improving technology. To be specific, here's how I see it, beginning with Rule No. 1. Consumers now zap through commercials on DVRs, minimize or ignore them on websites, or exit the room. Shoppers are tired of being bombarded with irrelevant messages, and technology can help them avoid many of them.
Similarly, Rule No. 2 is fading because consumers are now smart enough to know they're being tricked, and demanding enough to insist that it stop. Even as the networks have moved where the commercial breaks are and eliminated the traditional ads between programs, consumers figure out when to zap forward and when to hit the fridge.
The death of Rule No. 3 is more profound. The mass market no longer exists, and even if it did, it can't be reached effectively or efficiently. In 1970, the leading shampoo (Prell) had a market share of 15 percent. Today, the leading shampoo (Pantene) has a market share of about 5 percent. The market has fractionated into a large variety of smaller brands, each with its own niche and its own set of consumers, and media fractionization is, if anything, even more extreme.
Rule No. 4 has also disappeared from view. As marketers realize that they're no longer addressing a single mass market, but rather are trying to reach many niches and submarkets, the search for the single creative solution is as ineffective as the single media buy. What's needed is the right communication for the right audiences in the right situations.
Finally, as technology has melded the various communication approaches, the demarcation between advertising and promotion (Rule No. 5) has begun to disappear. If you're sending out a tweet, you want to focus on both the value of the brand and today's deal. Advanced TV offers integration of sampling and couponing into TV spots. The bright lines that divided advertising from promotion are being erased by technology at a rapid clip.
What does this all mean, and what should food retailers do about it? These are big, complex questions that I will elaborate on further next month.
The author is an independent consultant to leading retailers, manufacturers and service providers in the grocery industry. He can be reached at [email protected].