In this time of marketing abundance, huge opportunity to connect with consumers, understand their behavior and its drivers, both physical and psychological, not just the demographics of big groups who fall within arbitrarily nominated boundaries, why is the general standard of marketing so crap????
It seems to me that the defining skills of great marketing, the insights, creativity, compelling articulation of a proposition, empathy with a problem and its solution, and indeed asking question not asked before, have all been drowned in a deluge of marketing mediocrity coming from the abundance.
The Australian Marketing Institute recently published a paper wondering why the marketing profession is underrepresented in Australia’s boardrooms, and came up with a bunch or pretty treasonable reasons. However, to my mind, they missed the seminal one: most marketers, and hence their output are crap.
Many of the youngsters I see coming through who have a marketing degree chose marketing because it was the lowest UAI entry requirement. Whilst this may not be a good indicator in every individual case, on average, is it any wonder the level of real marketing skill is disturbingly low.
It seems also that anyone over 40, who has accumulated some life and management experience, and has the experience to have developed some instincts and insight, is seen as too old, too set in their ways, and unable to accommodate the fragmentation caused by digitisation, not “hip” enough.
What a waste this is!
People who run large businesses are smart, smart enough to see through the clichés and jargon of superficial so-called marketers, and the nonsense they hear erodes their confidence in the contribution real professionals can bring to bear.
I was just listening to a commentary on the productivity challenges facing Australian manufacturing on the radio, and the focus was on the old battleground of wages and benefits. If that is to be the central arena of the productivity improvement debate, we cannot expect any improvement at all, indeed, we will continue to slip down the greasy international productivity pole.
An improvement in our marketing and strategic productivity, although hard to measure in the quarterly reports required by our institutional masters , would make a huge difference.
