From Man Marketing to Mad Marketing!
Posted: Sunday, April 26, 2009
by Paul Ashby
http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com
At last some good news from the recession marketing theory is being exposed as the jargon-filled sham it always was! One of the problems with marketing management was all the research they invested in simply created problems because it ultimately took away the innate sense of personal responsibility that all Marketing people should have.
Today Marketing managers wade so deep in management theory that they can barely do their jobs.
By the Fifties it was almost mandatory in the US, if you wished to run a company get a master's degree in business administration an MBA preferably from Harvard Business School. Currently 1,800 students are beavering away, trying hard not to think too hard about the economic triumphs achieved by such notables as George W Bush and Rick Wagoner!
What you do get from Harvard is a wonderful network of people who were there with you and a set of tools that you can then bamboozle people with for the rest of your life! It is a habit of thought conventional responses to conventional situations. Business schools teach on a case study basis, so it is always telling people how to respond to things that happened in the past. No wonder that when something like the credit crunch comes along, huge numbers of highly skilled people in a compartmentalized world are unable to respond to it!
There is this cult of destruction that you see in American Management theory creative destruction, with the emphasis on destruction.
If there is any hope, it may not lie in the private sector, which will inevitably, sooner or late seek new potions from the witchdoctors.
Many think that, as they watched Management theory evolve into a religion wonder its false gods should tale responsibility for the current downturn. Target-related bonuses generated greed, which generated irresponsibility. Compartmentalization left bosses with no overall view of what was going on.
There is no doubt that Marketing encouraged similar kinds of thinking when it came to Advertising resulting in advertising that was totally dehumanized and depersonalized! Advertising Messages were constructed by researching what the competitors were doing, and saying, and then creating work that differed as much as possible from what was being said currently in the market place! Marketing Managers should be chosen not for their ability to bandy jargon with their superiors but for their empathy, pragmatism, experience and decisiveness with their staff.
This problem is discussed in my book "Television Killed Advertising" out now or @ Amazon Books UK, if you wish you can discuss it with me directly paul.ashby@yahoo.com Please also visit:http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com
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