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Marketing crisis in competence and capability: Creative Business has a great leading article based on research conducted by The Marketing Society and McKinsey called Marketing in Crisis.
When you think about the marketing crisis, you also need to think about the people providing the feedback. Other board colleagues might have a stilted or inaccurate view of what marketing does. But at the very least there seems to be a marketing crisis in miscommunication.
A second aspect of this marketing crisis report is to ask what’s in it for The Marketing Society and McKinsey. The Marketing Society would be looking to professionalise marketing and differentiate from the Chartered Institute of Marketing. McKinsey would look to deposition marketing teams so that it can sell additional services.
Key takeaways from the report include:
- Marketers are seen as creative but undisciplined
- Marketers don’t understand their own businesses
- In marketing led businesses such as FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), marketing is too important to be left to the marketers
- Marketing attracts the wrong kind of people
- Marketers are undisciplined
- Marketers are not interested in the P&L
So this also might explain many of the client horror stories that I hear from agency veterans in PR, advertising, design and branding.
The Buy Buy Generation
Young Japanese women are consumers with a high disposable income, publishers target them with ‘product porn’ style magazines focusing on luxury handbags, shoes and clothing. UK publishers are now looking to copy this format. What surprised me about this article is that it did not draw comparisions with the product porn gadget magazines targeted at young men in the UK like Stuff and T3.
Anybody walking the streets of London will have realised young Japanese are the most stylish people on the planet and avid collectors of the latest thing. On a related note the British boutique with a Japanese name Oki Ni have teamed up with the Adidas vintage connection to do two cool exclusive versions of Adidas’ ‘Torsion Special lo’ trainers here and here. These were the ultimate ravers trainer when they originally came out in the early 1990’s, they fit like a glove, are light, good cushioning, came in a multitude of colours (my originals were predominantly purple) and have a sole that will grip to any warehouse floor.