Ricardoblog 1.3

Our Biggest Brands Can No Longer Be Managed By Nerds

No One Would Argue With the Need for Consumer Research, but Marketing Is Not a Science

by Tom Hinkes
Published: March 17, 2010

Tom Hinkes

There’s something desperately wrong with consumer brand marketing. We all know it. The brand-building talent and expertise that created the CPG manufacturer are gone. Marketers with the ability to identify an unmet consumer need, develop a product to meet it, create a brand, and then lead it to market dominance are missing. Product managers with a fear of ambiguity have replaced the creative, forward-thinking brand builders. Our biggest consumer brands are now managed by nerds.

The crisis has been building for years and is now unavoidable. And because the wounds are self-inflicted, we cannot rely on the patient to heal itself. A quick review of industry news confirms this:

General Mills has identified their recipe for future growth. They’re “anticipating a rise in multicultural consumers, particularly Hispanics.” Apparently, they’ve also discovered that baby boomers are aging, and boomer children are more tech-savvy than their parents. Breathtaking, breakthrough stuff.

Kraft Foods is touting their “bold,” “top-to-bottom” “marketing makeover.” But the enduring images from the article are of Kraft executives wandering Cannes, contented dinosaurs and vanilla creative.

Industry researchers and academics have also recently weighed in with their diagnoses and prescriptions:

In “Adaptive Brand Marketing,” Forrester Research first suggests brand “managers” be renamed brand “advocates.” Then, the authors also recommend restructuring the brand manager role to better accommodate the “real-time digital world.” To better fit less than 10% of a CPG brand’s marketing budget, we should revamp the entire brand-management system?

In “Call to Action,” authors Carl Johnson and Henry Rak contend that weak brand-building skills have forced the CPG industry to a critical juncture. They offer several very logical prescriptions. But like so much of the brand marketing they’re despairing, their solutions are half measures, completely “by the numbers.”

We don’t need a “call to action,” we need an intervention.

More data is not better data
Marketing departments used to be the creative engines powering successful corporations. Now they’re overrun by number-crunching nerds. As a direct consequence, despite all the conspicuous focus on “change management,” the way brands respond to change in the marketplace has deteriorated. A McKinsey Quarterly article several years ago argued that the key to “better branding” is to build brands “more scientifically.” If managers would combine “forward-looking market segmentation” with structural-equation modeling, they could “build a better brand more efficiently.” In short: more data, more regressions and more conjoint analysis mean the “brand crisis” is solved.

But fluency with buzz words and expertise with spreadsheets do not guarantee brand-marketing competence.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE: http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=142841#