How Would Five Blind Men Describe Marketing?

Occasionally I stop in the Soflow universe of forums on marketing when notice pops up in my email that someone has opened a new discussion that interests me. Despite the fact that sophomoric postings are not all that unusual, I often encounter some genuine marketing bon mots worth remembering.

A week or so ago, Jonas Bergvall of Sweden (Soflow is quite global in its reach) challenged forum participants in a posting to address the issue of change and marketers' willingness (or reluctance) to give up the past rules of marketing.

Bergvall rhetorically poses:

• Who in their right mind would be interested in changing the rules of marketing? Marketing as we know it has been defined the same way since.... at least the 60's. Obviously we have got more choices now, in the form of more media and different channels, but basically marketing is just about the same. One could argue that positioning, relationship marketing and integrated communications for example were paradigm shifts, but in the end nothing much has changed.   It's still about a marketplace, a seller and a buyer and the game between the two.

Judging by the wide-roaming responses, marketing is deeply mired in an identity crisis. Jonathan Tren of Falls Church, Virginia responded:

• Effective marketing as a discipline is an ever changing-practice. Yet it does have solid foundations on which everything is based. But what are those foundations?

I take issue with the idea that marketing has solid foundations. Its identity crisis exists for the same reason teens suffer identity crises: lack of solid foundations on which to form an identity. Marketing suffers from a tight consensus about what marketing really is. Everyone seems to describe it differently.

Over the past two years or so I've participated in Soflow discussions, time and again I've been reminded of the ancient allegory about five blind men touching a single part of the elephant and asked by a teacher to describe the elepant. You’ve heard it before, but I’ll retell it anyhow:

• The blind man who touched the leg told the teacher the elephant is like the trunk of a tree; the tail-toucher said it's like a rope; the one who feels the trunk compares it to a tree branch; the man who felt the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; and the tusk feeler insists the elephant feels like a solid pipe.

This story particularly comes to mind in forum discussions about branding: what branding is, how it’s done and even if branding is a valid marketing idea in today’s market.

As I read stories like the recent one in Advertising Age about the short tenure of CMOs – barely two years! – I can only contemplate my profession with a sense of regret over how broadly and deeply it is failling to fulfill the expectations of just about everyone.

In their 1991 manifesto The Marketing Revolution, Kevin Clancy and Robert Shulman former chairman and CEO respectively of Yankelovich Clancy Shulman warned, “The revolution is coming because failure is sel-evident and everybody – stockholders, directors, CEOs, the government – is angry because marketing doesn’t work.”

Could we expect any different future for a profession whose trustworthiness is ranked by the public at-large as  just above that of used car salesmen?

Comments

[John Dodds]

That's a great illustration of what I term passive branding - marketing is no longer about pushing messages but more to do with ensuring that the whole company identifies its values and reflects them throughout all its actions. Like the five blind men, individuals then buy into which ever of the molecular attributes that appeal to their worldview.

[David]

John,

How right you are. And therein lies the seminal clue for getting marketing back on the right path: seeing the whole rather than a single part -- provided we can get consensus on what the whole looks like, is like, and acts like.

Thanks for your comment.

DBW

[Tom Asacker]

Great post David! And marketing, as a discipline, will continue to ebb until perspectives change radically; e.g. from "doing to" customes and employees to "doing with and for" them.

[Axel Goyeneche]

Very interesting information.

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Regards.