The funnel is dead, long live the loop

A piece I wrote in October 2011 for Campaign India on how the great marketing funnel has been replaced by the loop: http://www.campaignindia.in/Article/277798,opinion-a-re-think-the-funnel-is-dead-long-live-the-loop.aspx

Getting closer to the customer: A challenge for the C-suite

Getting closer to the customer is an Economist Intelligence Unit report which examines how the dialogue between customers and companies has changed in response to the advent of new communication channels.

Read more: http://www.managementthinking.eiu.com/getting-closer-customer.html#ixzz21WvxlFeI

The problem with advertising agencies. In brief.

I was lucky to have joined advertising in the days when people in agencies actually discussed briefs (no, think again). I have spent hours discussing the nuances of the lines that will describe the problem the brand was facing. The exact line that will form “what’s the one thing we want to communicate”. That was the most important part of my job. Everyone in the agency believed this and all of servicing was judged on one’s ability to distill the client’s problems to the magical document called the brief.

Then once we had rigorously finished each of the questions in the briefing document (after having survived the boss’ sarcasm and multiple corrections), we had to get it approved by the client. We then briefed creative and more often than not good, sometimes brilliant, but never mediocre work happened.

I have been a client for close to five years. The agency has created great work for us. That has moved markets and won awards (amazing but true). Have I seen a single briefing document? Nope. All the campaign briefings have been done practically directly to the creative team and then work directly presented by the creative team.

So, what’s the problem?

The problem is that most CEOs haven’t been agency servicing people. They come from various backgrounds: sales, finance, HR, marketing and today, a large portion of them are entrepreneurs. Making sense of what their business is, what are the key stumbling blocks, what is the role of communications in the business, and figuring out the communication mix before starting on creating an ad is critical.  My guess is this is not happening very well.

I sense that more and more CEOs will be directly talking to creative. More and more creative people will feel (rightly) that they can do this on their own. More and more boutique agencies run by creative duos will spring up and walk away with big business. And in most cases, bar a few exceptional creative people (who are great instinctive planners), start producing great looking totally off strategy work which will not move products. After the honeymoon period, the business of pitches will start and the downward spiral will continue.

All for the agency stalwarts lack of focus on what is truly the heart of the business: creating the perfect brief. And their failing to back that person whose job it was to.

Marketing creates Himesh Reshammiyas and the R D Burmans die.

I recently posted an innocuous status update on facebook: “What annoys you most about brands, marketing, and advertising?” The response was, to put it mildly, disturbing.

From the terse “The fact that they exist” to the amusing “Shahrukh Khan” to the more deliberated “The lack of (legally or socially) enforced or voluntarily embraced standards of authenticity and honesty in branding, marketing and advertising - for instance, to choose to highlight the best possible differentiators about a product in an ad, as opposed to saying what is likeliest to make the sale, even if it is total lies, play on words, or skimpy images....”

The debate about truth, lies and advertising and the purported irresponsibility of brand owners in this area has been going on for ages. What really interested me was the point that by the nature of its task (sell to more people) marketers searched for the most basic commonality (“the lowest common denominator”) in a large mass of people.  And that, amongst many things, caused “dumbing down of communication”.

As one of my friends put it so well “marketing, but probably economics in general, promotes the tyranny of the majority. Marketing creates Himesh Reshammiyas and the R D Burmans die.”

What do you think?