By Denise Lee Yohn, as posted on MEDIAWEEK | June 6, 2010
Denise is a brand consultant who has worked with Sony,
Frito-Lay, and Jack in the Box...to name a few. (Edited version)

Two recently published data points have me worried.

Eight out of the top 10 articles read by CMO.com's audience of senior marketing execs were about social or digital media. The second concerned a factoid that 62% of surveyed senior marketing execs said their focus this year will be on analyzing customer data to improve segmentation and targeting, 46% on investing in digital demand generation and online relationship building, and 44% on better qualifying and tracking lead conversion.

All this focus on social media and analytics seems to be sucking the creativity out of marketing.

Time was, brands developed big ideas and delivered and communicated them in unique and creative ways. Now it seems marketers are only interested in tactics and metrics.

Where is today’s equivalent of Apple’s groundbreaking “1984” spot (click here to see the ad)?

Or of the classic “Think Small” print ads from VW?

Certainly media and communications have changed, so a big TV spot or newspaper campaign probably isn’t the right approach for transformational marketing. But lately it seems the pursuit of breakthrough marketing creativity has taken a backseat to work on more predictable and achievable efforts.

This is a serious threat to marketing’s ability to drive business growth.  While there’s no question that social media includes some very powerful new communications platforms, we must not confuse tools with content. At the end of the day, the effectiveness of marketing is based on representing well the brand identity and positioning.

This social media myopia is also concerning because the platforms are changing so rapidly that reading about how other companies have used them can be irrelevant. As recently as a year ago, all a brand had to do was show up on Twitter and the company was heralded as being a leader in the field. Now consumers’ expectations are dramatically higher and they’re continually evolving.

If we want truly breakthrough marketing, we need to stop reading the same social media articles everyone else is reading, stop going to the same conferences everyone is attending, stop following the same gurus as everyone else, and stop trying to imitate.

Instead we should open ourselves up and expose ourselves to new and different inputs—engaging in novel cultural experiences, studying various fields of academic and scientific exploration, or simply surrounding ourselves with unusual people and things.

We also need to first think “what,” then “how.”  Carpenters don’t study their toolboxes to come up with ideas for furniture to make. 

Composers don’t begin writing symphonies by identifying the instruments which will play them. So marketers shouldn’t start with social media tools and then try to create a brand idea that lends itself to the platform.

Most analytics are used to uncover how to improve the efficiency of marketing activities—for example, how to segment customers into more discrete, more discriminated groupings in order to make targeting more efficient. Or how to track lead generation efforts, so those activities are less wasteful.

These analytics are useful but they’re unlikely to lead to transformative marketing efforts which truly drive new sales and grow the business.

Marketing operations should be less about data, more about insights—our tools should produce fewer measured steps, more creative leaps. Certainly this is more risky than what we’re doing today. 

Marketing mediocrity isn’t acceptable; it’s an oxymoron.

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