Despite the glamorous, sexy, and dramatic adventures of TV’s “Mad Men,” most marketers in the ’50s and ’60s didn’t have the wildly imaginative, four-scotch meetings that resulted in revolutionary creative. Marketing then was still a young practice, and most advertising of the day was simply “explaining” the features of a particular product, and then “pushing” the viewer/reader/listener to buy.
Today, most marketing strategies used then would probably feel a little stilted, formal, and alien to us with the “sell-as-much-as-we-can” philosophy and a complete disregard for establishing any kind of relationships for the long term. In Don Draper’s work on the TV show, we see start to see a rise in the idea that advertising should be less about arguing the virtues of a product and more about having some sort of emotional connection to it. For the ’60s, that really was a revolutionary idea.
We all know that marketing has been undergoing fundamental changes over the last few years. The explosive growth of digital — and specifically the social and mobile trends within it — has made relationship building and emotional connections the primary driver of marketing strategy. To achieve true “the brand is a part of our lives” integration, the consumer must trust your brand and feel an emotional connection to it. People become emotionally connected to a brand for a number of reasons:
• The brand stands for something important to them.
• The brand is intense and vibrant. It connects with people on multiple levels across several senses.
• The brand is unique.
• The brand is admirable.
• The brand consistently interacts with them. It never disappoints them.
• The brand makes them feel good.
So instead, we’re becoming the storytellers we always wanted to be and most marketers probably doesn’t have a marketing degree. If you do, then you’re the exception, not the rule. In fact, according to some studies, 10 percent of the profession are English majors that — well — didn’t make it with that novel or screenplay in our desk. The shift of marketing into developing “stories” is a big one — and it’s one many of us wanted to explore in our careers to introduce true relevance of message and connection to consumers.
Yet, in reality, we’re making it up as we go. The bad news for marketers is there’s no map, template, or formula for success. The good news? There’s no map, template, or formula for success. As marketers today, we get to “MacGyver stuff together” in all new, innovative ways to achieve marketing success.
Today, the marketing role within the organization has expanded. In many cases, not only are we working on customer relationships, we’re responsible for building evangelists, for building corporate communications, for feeding back information into product development, and for making sure that our CEO doesn’t stick his foot in his mouth. In many ways, content and communication is one of the single most important determinants of our company’s success. We can have a great product or a crappy product, but if we don’t have a good story to tell, tell it well, and build relationships with our consumers, we will fail.
About Wendi McGowan