Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Power of the Niche

Jim Meskauskas of Media Post has picked up on the recent commentary from McDonald's Head of marketing, Larry Light (see post McBranding below). He adds some nice commentary.

"Audiences in greater and greater numbers are being found in smaller and smaller environments. People are more frequently found in greater concentrations in more niche settings than they once were. This means that the standard method of "speak loudly and carry a big stick" communications is no longer working."

"Taking McDonald's' Mr. Light's approach of "brand journalism" through the layers of cultural voices as an example, marketing now may have to start to rely on quieter voices in smaller, more intimate places. What relying on media that represents repositories of cultural expression means is relying on mostly transient constructs that exist for specialized audiences that will ebb and flow with temporary zeitgeists. These vehicles are going to be necessarily niche in nature (like that alliteration?). That means no single one of them will be representative of a mass audience."

Modern marketing believes that we are right in the middle of a revoultion in the way that the world's largest companies communicate with digital consumers around the world. Fascinating times.

Network Enterprises

Very grateful to the Networker in yesterday's Observer for bringing to the attention of this blog the thinking of Manuel Castells - a subtle thinker who now teaches at the University of Southern California.

Castells' central insight was that we were moving into an era of what he called the network enterprise. This, he wrote in 2001, 'is neither a network of enterprises nor an intra-firm, networked organisation. Rather, it is a lean agency of economic activity, built around specific business projects, which are enacted by networks of various composition and origin'. The network, in other words, is the enterprise.

In that sense, Linux is - par excellence - a network enterprise, as indeed is open source software production generally. The 1999 protest that derailed the WTO meeting in Seattle was a networked enterprise. The whole peer-to-peer, file-sharing phenomenon is a networked enterprise.

Such thinking is right at the heart of what this blog refers to as Internet Culture.

Cannes' Modern Marketeers

Procter & Gamble's head of global media and communications, Bernard Glock, told some of the 8000 delegates at this week's Cannes International Advertising Festival that his focus for the next couple of years would be to counter the global bias of his consumer goods company, and the advertising industry at large, to make TV advertisements.

"The default position of the 30-second TV commercial, that's what I'm fighting against," he said. "In 2004, it still feels like 1984, with Big Brother still trying to influence our thinking."

Mr Glock's blunt call for a reduction in the dominance of TV broadcasters for large advertisers communicating to the masses is only one of a series of big themes to have emerged so far this week in Cannes.

"Consumers are very close to total saturation - something that was defined back in 1972 by Alvin Toffler in the book Future Shock as 'a paralysing surplus of choice'," said Tim Sanders, a European strategist for Yahoo! Europe.

The consequences, according to some, are that this decade will see the most rapid and widespread shifts in the way people consume media, manage their leisure time and buy stuff.

"In 20, 30, 40 years, professionals will say this decade was the biggest revolution in mankind's history," said Alexander Schmidt-Vogel, the worldwide chief executive of media buying and planning group Mediacom. "Consumers are taking control of their media and leisure time and they're more and more able to control what they're watching, listening to, reading and interacting with.

Modern marketing goes from strength to strength!!

Open Source Goes Abroad

The Economist on 12th June 2004, explores how open-source principles can be used in areas other than software. It asks whether open source can be used to bring drugs to market that can not be developed profitably in a private forum. But then broadens its view.

"More broadly, two big questions remain unanswered as the open source approach starts to colonise disciplines beyond its home ground of software development. the first is whether open source methids can genuinely foster innovation. The second question is semantic. What does it mean to apply the term 'open source' in fields outside software development, which do not use 'source code' as a term of art ?".

The Economist concludes,

"It seems that the time has come to devise a new broader term than open source to refer to distributed, internet based collaboration. Mr Benkler, law professor at Yale, calls it non-proprietary peer production of information-embedding goods. Surely some, somewhere can propose something snappier".

What this blog is interested in how such thinking refers to the world of modern marketing. Watch this space.

McBranding

MacDonalds head of marketing, Larry Light, has declared that mass marketing no longer works. Furthermore, Light goes onto declare, 'the end of brand positioning as we know it'.

Light has introduced brand journalism or brand narratives as a way of telling the story of a brand.

"We don't need one big execution of a big idea. We need one big idea that can be used in a multidimensional, multilayered and multifaceted way."

And he's backing it up with hard cash. Whereas two thirds of the company's $600 million marketing budget was once spent on prime time TV, now only one third is.

That is a modern marketeer of the highest order.

TV Turn-off for Men

New research confirms the belief that the large shift of men 18-34 from television to the Internet is true. BIGresearch's latest Simultaneous Media Usage Survey of 13,000 men confirmed Nielsen's claim that the drop in television rating was due to shift in media usage from television to the Internet and other electronic media.

The survey found from August 2002 to October 2003, television viewership dropped 8.8 percent for men 18-24 and 12.2 percent for men 25-34. During the same period of time, BIGresearch found Internet usage among men 18-34 shot up about 7 percent and video game usage rose 5 percent.

It's time for network executives to stop squabbling and realize their long cherished model is changing. Television won't die but it will become something vastly different from what it is today.

Research is slowly catching up with the modern marketeer!