What is the Marketing Neo-Renaissance? It is successfully connecting with a prospect/customer by sending not only the message they want to hear, but also when and where they want to hear it. The era of integrated multi-channel marketing is here, and the consumer is calling the shots . The challenge for marketers in this new era is to understand target audiences so intimately that they can incorporate marketing messages into the audiences’ lifestyles without being a distraction . The bedrock of integrated marketing communications is having a thorough knowledge of one’s customers. It will be the marketers who understand their customer’s media consumption habits , lifestyle interests and purchase behaviour who will survive and thrive in the coming age. [Fragmentation of audience] In 1995 it took three TV commercials to reach 80 percent of women aged 18 to 49. In 2000, it took 97 TV ads to reach that same group.
Out of the old forms direct mail is the only even remotely trackable tactic, and with that you can only tell if someone has responded using the coupon or whatever it is you’ve sent them.
Advergaming is on the rise using techniques such as in-game billboards. It’s considered less intrusive than product-placement in film and TV. Buzz, viral and word of mouth marketing on the rise . 87% of US consumers indicate they trusted word of mouth recommendations the most. P&G have consequently created groups such as 300,000 teenagers identified as being ‘thought leaders’ or ‘influential’ among their peers. They are then given first access to products in hopes they’ll spread the word about them. As Misloski was writing P&G were just replicating the project with 400,000 to 600,000 mothers. The subservient chicken example of advertainment received 46 million hits in it’s first week (hits are virtually meaningless as a measurement tool these days). The main focus of online advertising in 2010 is contextual and behaviourally targeted advertising . Contextual example: on car safety website you’re shown ads for Michelin’s safest road tyres. Behavioural example: you look at a few sites relating to car safety, and others to do with SUVs, the software will compile this information and show you a Volvo SUV ad (Volvo’s are traditionally ‘safe cars’). Video advertising , where you get content you want like sports coverage from ESPN, but there are adverts you have to watch before you get to the content you want. Spotify is now trying a similar model for music. Know your customer – know their lifestyle interests, product consumption behavior, purchase behavior, media consumption habits, demographics, motivations and attitudes. Establish pertinent product offerings and relevant communications. Establish and maintain a strong brand. Design creative that stands out from the competition. Give customers something to talk about (encourage word of mouth) and the customers will become your sales force.
[Structuralism] This was taken forward in the thirties by Jacobson who proposed that language is an unconscious model built around relationships; difference and oppositions, which exists independently of the observer. Language is no longer seen as a means of expression at the disposal of a speaking subject. Language is not an instrument of thought but the precondition for thought and social existence. It is thought the unconscious is structured like a language (Jacques Lacan). [The Gift] The giving of the gift creates an inherent obligation on the received to reciprocate the gift. Key examples: Health charities sending you a free pen so that you feel obligated to donate. Open source software, encourages the rapid development of community around a shared goal. [Death of the Author] Could be read as early echo of our modern empowered consumer defining how they want to interact with your marketing materials because they have the choices, especially online. [The Hidden Persuaders] Packard explores the use of consumer motivational research and other psychological techniques, including depth psychology and subliminal tactics, by advertisers to manipulate expectations and induce desire for products, particularly in the American postwar era. It also explores the manipulative techniques of promoting politicians to the electorate. The book questions the morality of using these techniques. This idea of manufacturing desire stems from the psychoanalysis of Freud and was first applied to business by Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew) in the US in the 1920s. He was used by the US govmt to make Woodrow Wilson appear as a great liberator of the people, but after the war Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s: "We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overshadow his needs." Bernays 5mins 46 into the Youtube vid till the end: In the 1920s, working for the American Tobacco Company, he sent a group of young models to march in the New York City parade. He then told the press that a group of women's rights marchers would light "Torches of Freedom". On his signal, the models lit Lucky Strike cigarettes in front of the eager photographers. The New York Times (1 April 1929) printed: "Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of 'Freedom'". This helped to break the taboo against women smoking in public.
This is what Baudrillard refers to at the beginning of his Simulation & Simulacra
From Disneyworld Company – Baudrillard – 1996 In the early 80s, when the metallurgical industry in the Lorraine region entered its final crisis, the public powers had the idea to make up for this collapse by creating a European leisure zone, an "intelligent" theme park which could jumpstart the economy of the region. This park was called Smurfland. The managing director of the dead metallurgy naturally became the manager of the theme park, and the unemployed workers were rehired as "smurfmen" in the context of this new Smurfland. Unfortunately, the park itself, for several reasons, had to be closed, and the former factory workers turned "smurfmen" once again found themselves on the dole. It is a somber destiny which, after making them the real victims of the job market, transformed them into the ghostly workers of leisure time, and finally turned them into the unemployed of both. But Smurfland was only a miniature universe. The Disney enterprise is much bigger. To illustrate, it should be known that Disney "Unlimited," having taken over one of the major US television networks, is about to purchase 42nd Street in New York, the "hot" section of 42nd Street, to transform it into an erotic theme park, with the intention of changing hardly anything of the street itself. The idea would be simply to transform, in situ, one of the high centers of pornography into a branch of Disney World. Transforming the pornographers and the prostitutes, like the factory workers in Smurfland, into extras [figurants] in their own world, metamorphosed into identical figures, museumified, disneyfied. At Disney World in Orlando, they are even building an identical replica of the Los Angeles Disneyland, as a sort of historical attraction to the second degree, a simulacrum to the second power. It is the same thing that CNN did with the Gulf War: a prototypical event which did not take place, because it took place in real time, in CNN's instantaneous mode. Today, Disney could easily revisit the Gulf War as a worldwide show.
From Mark Poster’s introduction to the Selected Writings of Baudrillard
Attempts to combat the impact of the modern societal fragmentation have included: Nationalism, trying to draw people together under the shared auspices of their relation to a nation (works particularly well in wartime). Communism, bringing people together under a global ideology of equality of labour. Modernism, bringing people together under a common search for progress.
