Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

From Hucksterism to Healing

Some readers may recall my June 18 posting in which I discussed a moral shift of epochal proportions taking place in marketing. I wrote that some companies have renounced the 20^th century marketing paradigm based on bending customers’ wills to the marketer’s will in favor of adopting the 21^st century marketing paradigm that is based on building empathetic connections with customers so as to better help them solve their problems.

Now, Amazon shows signs of moving closer to the healer paradigm with an innovative addition to its home page: It’s running movies on its home page that are designed to support customers’ desires to solve problems that stand in their way of having a better life.

The first film is about an ugly duckling in the corporate jungle who suddenly emerges as a queen of beauty much to the consternation of her shallower coworkers.

The second film is a psychedelic expression of the perennial quest for true love, while the third film deals with the conflict between mindless pursuit of ambition and the need of the human spirit to from time to time stop to smell the roses.

The fourth of five planned movies will be posted this week.

Interestingly – to show that Amazon has not totally abandoned the idea that it has a lot of product to move – the credit roll at the end of each movie identifies products shown in the films that can be purchased from Amazon.

Amazon’s use of inspirational or motivational films in its marketing reflects several emergent properties of postmodern marketing. First, it acknowledges the growing importance of the customer experience in successful marketing. Second, it exemplifies the more indirect approach of the 21^st century marketing paradigm that eschews direct, in-your-face marketing bombasts.

BTW, another example of the marketer as healer was reported in the Wall Street Journal week before last. In Germany, branches of the company that not a few people hate most – Wal-Mart – has a special shopping time on Fridays for singles that has been a smash success. Singles quoted in the article reported feeling more comfortable looking through the aisles of a Wal-Mart for companionship candidates than in a singles bar. Even the preminent merchant of our times is looking at the 21st century marketing paradigm – at least in it German outlets.

Branding Challenge: Gaining Cultural Legitimacy

In coining the term cultural legitimacy in a marketing context, consumer researcher Harvey Hartman has made a notable contribution to the sciences and arts of marketing. In this week’s edition, Hartman’s organization’s online newsletter Hartbeat had this to say about cultural legitimacy:

“One of the great things about consumer capitalism is that it continuously generates the New. Some of these concepts succeed in establishing themselves, but most don't. The reason lies in the difference between a fad and a trend.

Trends have more staying power because they have established themselves within the culture as having legitimacy. Products and services achieve cultural legitimacy to the degree that they establish themselves in association with trends.

A brand gets cultural legitimacy depending on whether it has street credibility within the world it wants to hang its shingle.”

I recommend a visit to the November 23 edition of Hartbeat, for it highlights crucial differences between traditional and postmodern brand husbandry. It’s a matter of the differences between the mindset behind the 20^th century product centric marketing paradigm and the 21^st century customer centric marketing paradigm.

We hear a lot these days about customer centricity, but most marketing remains product centric despite claims to trhe contrary. For example, many claim that CRM (customer relationship management) is customer centric, but in reality it is product centric because it merely uses hi tech to accomplish waht marketers have always striven to do: get more product into consumers' hands.

Harvey Hartman's mindset will help those truly interested in becoming customer centric to develop the mindset required to do so.

Maybe Not Always Coke

Looking back a century, only one of the top 10 U.S. companies in existence in 1900 made it to the year 2000 – General Electric.

Looking ahead, might the Coca-Cola Company be but a distant memory in 2100 given the fact that the world’s best-known brand is deeply troubled and seems unable to find the right path back to full health.

A story ran in this week’s Advertising Age about Coke’s chairman/CEO Neville Isdell proclaiming “Coke’s Manifesto for Change.”  His proclamation brings to mind a similar one by Coke COO’s Steven Heyer in February 2003 when he promised that Coke was about to start marketing in “a radical new way.”

Ad Age reported Isdell’s objective to “double the value of the Coca Cola trademark within a decade by reviving the icon with advertising with a youthful point of view.” This ignores stalled population growth in younger age groups and the emergence of the New Customer Majority – adults 40 and older who outnumber 18-39-year-olds by 128 to 85 million, and whose numbers continue growing dramatically.

Gap tried the “youthful point of view” strategy several years ago and sank into red ink for 23 consecutive months. It returned to black ink only after launching its “For all generations” campaign.

Sneaker maker New Balance eschewed the “youthful point of view” in the early 1990s, just after the New Customer Majority came into being, and went on to move from the number 12 spot to the number three spot among sneaker makers while even mighty Nike experienced no growth in sneaker sales during much of the 1990s.

Isdell told analysts and reporters, “Through innovation, leadership and execution, this company can be great again. We're not talking radical change in strategy, we're talking about dramatic change in execution.”

Isdell’s words remind me of Einstein’s famous dictum, “A problem can’t be solved in the same consciousness that created it.” Isdell is mired in the consciousness that created Coke’s present woes.  Indeed, radical changes in today’s markets do require radical changes in strategy, not just in the superficialities of execution.

Reality vs. Fantasy in Marketing to Today's Woman

Michele Miller over at the Wonderblog writes about how mainstream retailers like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s are beginning to use female mannequins that are more true-to-life in size and shape. She observes that mannequins have traditionally been size 4 despite size 14 being closer to reality for the average American woman.

Well, I think fast-growing Chico’s solved the size problem a while back when it simply abandoned the traditional scale and set up its own.

Is Chico’s guilty of deception?  Or manipulation? I think not. Having shopped at Chico’s I’ve been struck by the sensitivity of its sales associates. I wasn’t made top feel like a “dumb” husband when I first visited Chico’s and was thrown off by its sizing scale. I write about that experience in my recent book, Ageless Marketing (page 253).

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Chico’s approaches retailing from a customer centric perspective – not from marketers’ flawed perspective that every woman wants to be at least four sizes smaller than she is; therefore depicting small-sized women in advertising and mannequins will attract more interest than showing women closer to what they really are.

But that notion is wrong – more so now than ever because most women now being 40 or older have entered the time of life when reality is more attractive than groundless fantasy and meaningless dreams -- as indicated in the series on season-of-life influences on consumer behavior that I've just wrapped up.

The Stories We Live By Change By Season of Life

We live out our lives as personal narratives. However, as we move through the seasons of life our storylines and the characters and mythic themes of our stories change to reflect differing developmental objectives of the various seasons.

The mythic theme in Spring is fantasy. Fantasy gives flight to the imagination and obscures the boundaries between reality and nonreality. Thus it makes sense to the child that animals talk like people. But teens are heavy into fantasy, as well for fantasy serves a crucial role in fulfilling the primary developmental objective of spring. It helps develop a creative mind that will be useful in problem solving in one’s adult future.

The mythic theme of Summer is romantic in the heroic sense. This theme engenders feelings of power: “There is nothing I cannot do if I put my mind to it. The world is my oyster and I will harvest many pearls.” This attitude and dedication to fulfilling one’s heroic aspirations serves the primary developmental objective of Summer: becoming someone socially and vocationally. During Summer, people generally have a strong inclination to demonstrate their social and vocational successes through what they buy and the friends they keep, thus have long received the lion’s share of attention from marketers.

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Reality is Fall’s mythic theme. Less attention is paid larger-than-life dreams that fuel ambitions in Summer. Most people become more realistic about their capabilities and limitations in Fall and covet a simpler and less stressful lifestyle than they experienced in summer. Many experience an ebbing of materialistic appetites as they begin examining their lives less in terms of material accomplishment and more in terms of life’s ultimate meanings.

Winter’s mythic theme is irony. One’s life story is filled with incongruities and paradoxes. IN one’s youth, an explanation is sought for everything. But in Winter, a person is more likely to be resigned to the idea that much in life happens than cannot be explained The black-and-white simple descriptions of reality that satisfied the younger mind have given way to a reality painted in shades of gray. Interestingly, with little time left, Winter often brings forth a patience that is rare among youth. One 85-year-old woman, who had just planted several shade tree seedlings in her garden, when asked why she didn’t plant larger trees replied, “Because I’m into beginnings, not endings.”

How Life Focus Changes with Each Season of Life

Each season of life has a characteristic life focus that is a catalyst of personal development. Life focus by season:

Play (Spring): The play imperative draws the young into modeling life, whether it involves Tonka trucks and Barbie dolls in the single digit years, or in later adolescence, dreaming about heroic achievements, material accomplishments and career possibilities. This modeling is essential to achieving the primary developmental objective of Spring: acquiring basic intellectual, emotional and social skills needed to enter adulthood with reasonable prospects for success.

Work (Summer): Work is the means by which people establish their social value and give material proof of their accomplishments, necessary steps for fulfilling the primary developmental objective of Summer: becoming someone socially and vocationally.

Work-play (Fall): In contrast with the intensity of life focus on play and work in Spring and Fall, respectively, the onset of Fall inclines a person toward moderation and balance. The inner self, long submerged by an outer-world directed agenda, seeks a simpler life in which focus shifts from becoming someone to being someone. This facilitates fulfillment of the primary developmental objective of Fall: determining the ultimate meaning of one’s life as part of more fully developing the inner self

Reconciliation (Winter): The quest for reconciliation in the closing years of life reflects the universal desire to be at peace with self, family, friends and the world at-large as one draws one’s last breath in fulfillment of Winter’s primary developmental objective: reaching a transcendent state that deepens life satisfaction and increases resilience in the face of untoward conditions the future may hold.

Success in connecting with consumers is made more certain by keying marketing communications to both the primary developmental objective and life focus of the core market, based on the season of life most of its members are passing through. For instance, refer back to the previous post which compared values projected by Nike with values projected by New Balance. The values Nike projects are keyed to mid- to late Spring (adolescents) and Summer (young adults). New Balance's core market consists of people passing through the Fall of life.

Next: The Stories We Live By Change By Season of Life

P.S. I came across an article last week that does a pretty good job of outlining what’s necessary to connect with the Springtime adolescent mind – especially in the observation that “Teens create their own worlds. Their reality is under their control – the line between reality and non-reality has dissolved.”