Blessed are the Bean Counters

Marketers need to start attending to the enduring principles of great marketing and resist the allure of faddish new paradigms that crop up every few years, writes Leo Moore.
engagement paradigm assumes that consumers will embrace two-way relationships with brands relationships based on participation and deep commitment. In tandem with the emergence of this new paradigm is a belief that vast swathes of human behaviour have ceased to happen, with knock-on impacts on how we market brands. Hands up whose heard that Television Is Dead (or press, or radio for that matter). This new paradigm is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how consumers choose brands and how much they care about brands. The reality is that consumers dont want relationships with brands, in fact they generally dont care or even know that much about brands. This doesnt mean that brands arent important or that marketing communication doesnt play a role in how brands are chosen and grow. Quite the opposite. What it does mean is that we need to start attending to the enduring principles of great marketing and resist the allure of faddish new paradigms. We need to embrace the power of new technology and new media to do what we do as an industry with greater efficiency and effectiveness than we did before, not use it to throw the baby out with the bath water. Thankfully, recent years have seen huge strides in the establishment of evidence-based principles for effective marketing driven by the luminaries such as Les Binet and Peter Field at the IPA Databank in the UK and Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Australia. Their work supports the on-going need for sophisticated mass marketing to deliver effective results for brands. They are united in their belief in the on-going effectiveness of targeting broad populations and delivering wide reach, they are agreed on the primacy of emotional appeals over rational appeals and they are united in their belief in the enduring power of TV. What makes their arguments so compelling is the rigour they have applied to developing their principles (in the case of Benet and Field they have based their findings on the business effects of 1,000 advertising campaigns from over 30 years worth of IPA effectiveness data). It is incumbent on all of us who seek to further the cause of marketing and advertising to place greater emphasis on proof and accountability and less on the fashionable and ephemeral. If we can combine the creativity and thirst for invention that have long characterised our industry with the rigour and credibility that we have often lacked, we will have the recipe for greater success now and into the future, and I will never wish to be an accountant again. Leo Moore is a planning director at Irish International Proximity. In Association with the APMC.

very man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to

raise themselves above the ideas of the time Voltaire. I never thought I would say this, but there are times when I envy accountants. I envy the credibility and respect that is conferred on those who work in a profession built on a solid set of principles. The Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are a set of standards and rules that are used in the preparation of accounts. These principles permit business owners, investors and other stakeholders to come to a clear and consistent understanding of an enterprises financial status based on reading its audited financial statements. In contrast to accountancy, marketing is founded on paradigms not principles. Principles are defined as fundamental truths or propositions that serve as the foundation for a system of belief or behaviour. Paradigms, in contrast, are defined as typical examples of, or patterns in, belief or behaviour. In following principles we do things because there are established and proven rules; in abiding by paradigms we do things because others are doing them. No wonder those who work in marketing and advertising are often accused of an obsession with the Emperors New Clothes. Principles feel solid and substantial, paradigms feel slightly more vacuous and lightweight. This triumph of paradigms over principles has fostered a mindset in marketing that craves novelty and favours innovation (often for its own sake) over proven best practice. While there are many benefits to our industry from this thirst for progress there are also some downsides. The impact of this mindset has been thrown into sharp focus by the accelerated pace of technological development in recent years. The changes in consumer behaviour driven by technology have been very significant and there is no doubt that the ways in which consumers shop, consume media and interact with the world have been permanently altered. Only a complete fool (or Luddite) would deny this. The response of the marketing and advertising community has been to establish a new paradigm for marketing, a paradigm founded on the illdefined notion of engagement. At its heart the

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IMJ APRIL / MAY 2013

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