Youngme Moon of the Harvard Business School created this video introducing her new book, DIFFERENT. She describes the book as "an intimately drawn meditation on the meaning of business differentiation."

If the book is half as good as the video promises, it should be a great read.

After all the research, focus groups and C-level selling is done, what's left of the marketing budget is spent on a campaign message. At this point, the message is often so homogenized and watered-down, that it’s madness to think that it would work at all.

Yet, this process is still typical in even the most sophisticated marketing organizations.

Failure is met with shock and surprise. “How could this not work?”  “We tested everything and reflected our consumer’s needs and wants in every picture and copy point.”

Budweiser is a prime example of this myopia. An article in Advertising Age, titled, “Budweiser’s Big Blunder: Letting Consultants Steer Brand” had this to say:

Shortly after August Busch IV was named CEO of Anheuser-Busch, he accepted a company director's recommendation for a consulting firm that would assist with managing the brewer's burgeoning brand portfolio. The firm, Cambridge Group, ended up going far beyond portfolio management. In fact, its exhaustive research resulted in the "Drinkability" campaign that -- four years and millions in fees later -- is considered a major factor in Bud Light posting the first full-year sales decline in its history.

Do you know your audience? Really know them? I wager that despite collecting, collating and deciphering all the research they can about their target, most companies don’t know squat. Just like Cambridge and Anheuser-Busch.

The reason is that most marketing organizations are consumed by their own rigid and collectively agreed upon definitions of their target group, as if it’s a completely unique sub-genre of the human race.

Mark Earls sums up marketing's obsessive dependence on target research nicely in his article, “The New Audience”:

Since its earliest days, marketing has prided itself on putting the people who buy the products being marketed (or the 'consumers', as we've got used to calling them) at the heart of its thinking and processes. You could argue that the fundamental point of marketing (as well as its primary contribution to contemporary culture) is the idea of organizing business around the needs, wants and desires of the people who buy its goods and services.

Along the way, we've come to rely on certain ideas about these people – how they do what they do, how they make the decisions we seek to influence, the nature of the relationship between us and them, and the importance of the role we play in their lives.

He goes on to suggest that this is changing. That perhaps the assumption that thought proceeds action, is in fact wrong:

In recent years, science has encouraged us to rethink much of what we took for granted about the people who make up our audiences. We have learned that thinking is much less important than we imagine in shaping our behaviour. Much of our decision-making is essentially automatic and based on shorthand and heuristics; we often do stuff and make sense of it later. Cognitive behavioural scientists, such as Kahnemann and tversky, and Nudge authors thaler and Sunstein, have catalogued the cognitive biases that have come from our “lazy brain's” use of shorthand and heuristics for decision-making.

Thought can be a barrier to action. Too much of it can get in the way and in fact become paralyzing. Think about it. We learn by doing the things we do, not by being told, or informed. Especially not by an inanimate brand fronting an organization with a vested interest.

So, if you’re trying to change perceptions, it’s important to keep in mind that perception change is a result of changed behaviour, not the other way around. That is, if we are trying to change perceptions then we should probably be thinking about the behaviour change required to do so. And if we are simply trying to change behaviour we shouldn’t put the need to change perceptions in the way as a barrier.

Mark Earls also suggests that the key to behaviour change is in influencing and learning from each other:

Equally, we've come to understand that we are a fundamentally social species. Our minds are supremely adapted for a world of others, rather than for independent thought. Our ability to learn from each other (via 'social learning' and the disembodied accumulation of others' knowledge and skills we call 'culture') is now widely seen to be the key mechanism behind the spread of all kinds of phenomena, from the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, and whether we vote or not, to the names we give our children. Many now believe this must therefore also be the key to changing such behaviour.

The best companies seem to innately know this. Companies like Apple and Nike place less importance on dissecting their audience and more importance on offering products that people want and want to talk about. In Apples case, products that people will line up for when launched, as if they’re attending a rock concert.

I’m going to say something radical. Challenge the target research, if not chuck it altogether.

Dare to be different and meaningful.

Rather than chasing your target, have the courage to attract and lead.

People will buy your brand based on an alignment of values, ideals and attitude - sometimes even more so than if the product actually fulfills a need.

Once again, take Apple for example. It’s not like as if anybody needs an iPad. Yet the internet has been buzzing about it since it was announced. And on April 2, you can bet to see lineups.

Mark Earls concluded his excellent article with this:

Next time you find yourself thinking about your audience, please remember this: they're very different from what we've been told – less considered and deliberative and certainly much more influenced by each other than even they'd like to admit. More importantly, they're not really an audience in the way that received wisdom suggests – passive and dependent on what you offer. They're not 'listening' and, to be honest, they're not yours. If they're an audience at all, it's first and foremost for themselves. And therein lies the opportunity for marketers.

How do you feel about your own marketing efforts? Is it the way you’d like to be marketed to? Is it something you’d be proud to tell your friends about? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

An excellent article on the history of advertising written by Randall Rothenberg for Ad Age. Certainly an article that new people in the business should read and study.

He finishes the article with this:

But as we near the end of the broadcasting era, at the twilight of the advertising century, this much is now clear: In the spark of creativity lies the future of business.

This is a fundamental truth, regardless of changing technology and the advance of metrics. Though, Bill Bernbach in the 1960's said it best when challenged with the silly idea that advertising is science:

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

He also said:

However much we would like advertising to be a science-because life would be simpler that way-the fact is that it is not. It is a subtle, ever-changing art, defying formulaization, flowering on freshness and withering on imitation; where what was effective one day, for that very reason, will not be effective the next, because it has lost the maximum impact of originality.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A blog started by a Brit who claims that he is the CMO "of a big company. I can't say who. But if I say we're number 2 in the European consumer durables market relating to, or directly involving, cleaning clothes and or soft furnishings and or other fabrics, with a commitment to excellence, quality and placing superior cleaning at the core of our customers' product experience, I think you'll suss. Yes - that's us!"

The blog is mostly written to and about ad agencies, letting them know the realities of how he, as a senior marketing guy thinks. The language he uses would've made Sam Kinison blush, which after some debate, I've decided to let stand.

Here are a few of his insights into the workings of the ad biz:

The presentations

I've admitted several times that planners and their powerpoint slides turn my mind into bum-gravy, but they're by no means alone. Over the years, agencies have made many and varied attempts to present me into my fucking grave.

On one occasion, an agency MD gave me 30 slides on the agency's long and celebrated history, the account director gave me 40 slides on their 'brand eruption methodology', a planner gave me the usual 50 slides on whatever the fuck it is they do and the media buyer gave me 60 slides on audience segmentation, reach, 'the media day' and his manifesto on 'owning the media worldscape'.

Then the creative director showed me a half-page ad, a flyer and an insert for the Northampton cunting Trumpet. 

The agency barista

I am a prolific consumer of coffee (especially in the morning, when I like to make a smoothie with coffee, bacon, fried bread, black pudding, eggs, ham, lamb tikka bhuna and sausages) but even I can't fathom why agencies need a fully-fledged coffee emporium inside their building. Some of you agency hamshanks even have some desperate intern as a barista, making little ferns in the milk of your skinny latte while he dreams of being allowed to blow the creative director's assistant's dog-walker's fucking builder.

Do you know how many coffee shops there are in Soho? Exactly 7,434. There are branches of Starbucks in supermarkets, petrol stations, funeral parlours, strip joints, municipal dumps, drains, the trousers of people who stand still too long - you fucking name it. I came down to my car one morning and there was one in the fucking boot! There's more coffee than rain in Britain! Just go out and get some!

The names

It used to be Surname & Surname. Then Surname would get a call from this other Surname - and his very good friend, Surname. They'd do some lunching and, a bit later, merge into Surname, Surname, Surname & Surname. Then Surname would leave, but Acronym & Surname would come along - creating Acronym, Surname, Surname & Surname. By this time, agencies had rebelled against that old-fashioned naming protocol and were going for Dark & Esoteric or Edgy & Cool. So when Acronym, Surname, Surname & Surname acquired an up-and-coming agency to compensate for fact that they'd grown too rich to be bothered, they became Acronym, Surname, Surname & Surname / Edgy & Cool.

Now, agencies are called things like UnCulture or MeLikeYouLikeHappyTime, and I honestly can't decide which is fucking worse.

The industry-wide self-delusion that they aren't salespeople.

Come on, folks. Let's the two of us have a heart-to-heart here. Nobody else - just us. Let me be honest, because I like you / you buy me beerz.

The only difference between you and a car salesman is an ironic T-shirt.

The constant fucking 'offerings'.

What is it with you fucking people? Why does everything you do have to have a name? Why do you have to call two account executives trawling the internet for second hand research 'The Truth Laboratories'? Why is your planning department 'The Disrupterference Unit'?

And why must you have a fucking 'system'? Because whether you call it '360 Insightification', 'Mirage-Busting' or 'Gorgeouslogicmakesideasgrow', I know that your 'offering' involves an account man giving a brief to some one-time film-makers/novelists who will do everything they can to produce work that turns them back into film-makers/novelists. And you know it too, you fucking con artists.

The flaunting.

I walk into my agency. The sofas are beautiful. The reception desk is like something from a spaceship. The flooring has the reassuring feel of real wood. The sculpted fittings and furniture are sleek and beautiful. There are grand plasma screens, a stunning sculpture and, for real impact, one of the Minis from The Italian Job.

THAT'S MY FUCKING FEE, YOU CUNT-FORKS!

Jesus wept. It's like a mugger popping round the next day to show you what he spent your cash on. 'Look, I got this nice watch - and I sold your phone for this jacket. Fucking nice, eh? Same time tomorrow, you fucking twonk?'

A brand has a sustained, meaningful difference

Or a difference that’s forgotten and allowed to erode

A brand is a fulfilled promise

Or a broken one

A brand is utility and innovation

Or the boring and safe, same old

A brand is the one time it failed

Not the many times it succeeded

A brand is its current advertising

Not the great advertising that may have gone before

A brand is the values of company executives

Not the values engraved on a plaque at reception

A brand is service calls handled promptly and courteously

Or service calls routed to India

A brand is made profitable through customer stakeholders

Not stockholders

A brand is why employees are proud of their job

Or hate it

        A brand is the act of offering non-customers deals to switch

        While offering current customers nothing

        A brand is policies to make the company more efficient

        While making customer’s lives less convenient

A  brand can be built or broken

Not by advertising

By the people managing it