Codes & changeability: Understanding the modern consumer

The decline & fall of effective marketing?

Reading The effectiveness code (2020) and The marketer's toolkit 2021: Navigate through uncertainty (2020), and other papers like it, is making me re-think the concept of creative marketing effectiveness.

Essentially, it seems to me, one part of today's marketing industry is engaged with the idea of decay – with the feeling things are getting worse. Marketing is less effective, the argument goes, because of financial short-termism. Thus, brands are being driven into a state of decline and fall, because of an intense pressure for immediate ROI.

The effectiveness code, by James Hurman and Peter Field, advocates an understanding of outstanding commercial creativity. A superlative effort that is rewarded by significant consumer response, which in turn translates into robust, if long-term profitability.

The paper argues for a marketing approach that is bigger, better, 'more'. An approach through which the brand is boosted by well-funded, properly distributed and highly resonant (i.e. creatively meaningful) marketing.

This is a world of large brands, captained by ambitious owners and visionary marketers, aided by their intellectual and creative advisors: creative marketing agencies.

It is, at heart, a philosophical view of the world. It positions the present as not as good as the past, and the future as worse than both of these – unless the addressee listens to the writers and corrects course.

Empiricism & its discontents

In order to create the effectiveness code, Hurman and Field investigate what kind of creative marketing has worked in the past. And so, the study is based on an

"analysis and comparison of close to 5,000 effectiveness award entrants and winners from 2011 through 2019, sourced from the Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions database (1,031 cases), WARC’s database (3,616) and the IPA databank (216) [in order to uncover] a new principle of effectiveness."

Of course, you can look at what has worked before, to know what could work in the future. Find the commonalities in what has been effective; gather these together; come up with a clear set of strategic, creative, media budget, channel distribution and consumer response principles.

Take, in other words, a large set of information, lay it out under bright lights and identify the patterns.

It is an empirical method, that assumes that the future of marketing can be relatively straightforward to plan for.

But the study is based on a narrow conception of the world, I would argue. It doesn't take into account the possibility that it may misguided to try to re-capture what has been lost. That today's less effective marketing may not be due to financial short-termism alone (I don't reject the idea, it has its value), but also to fundamental changes at a cultural, social and societal level.

Today and tomorrow's consumer may be different, even radically so, from yesterday's consumer. And so, to speak to them in what used to be effective ways may be to miss the point entirely.

An uncertain process

Marketing effectiveness, typically talked about in order to know how to build brands, could also be interesting as a method to understand consumers and citizens.

For example: marketing can be shown to have been effective in a particular context, in a specific time and place. In a context that is socially and culturally defined, or at least definable. And as such, one that reveals aspects about how people have felt and thought, behaved – acted.

From this theoretical point of view, marketing effectiveness isn't so much the production of an impact, closed-off and mechanical, neat and replicable as a code (before, now and in the future), but instead, it could be viewed as the product of a tension between a context, a creative message and a consumer/citizen.

Investigating that tension, that point of contact, reveals (has the potential to reveal) the communication as it lives. Communication in action: dynamic and real.

Less certain, less theoretically rigid; more alive, more fragile.

On the one hand, you have the effect as a mechanical product. On the other: the effect as an uncertain product. Leading to the construction of a code, or to a conception of changeability.

Change & changeability

To summarise: we have, in much marketing effectiveness theory, a structured understanding of the world. One that's based on an empirical approach, and an assumption that tomorrow's bright future lies in yesterday's successes.

Brand owners, marketers and creative agencies can work towards long-term brand building, more lastingly profitable, if they concentrate on big media budgets and bold creative strategies. They should move away from the pressure for immediate ROI, a survival of the fittest mentality, that destroys the potential for healthy growth.

But this way of thinking, I would argue, takes little account of the modern consumer or citizen. Or better: the changeability of the modern consumer or citizen.

Things have been and are changing; mindsets, values and perceptions are changing.

Who or what are we advocating for, when we recommend big media budgets, long-lasting marketing campaigns? Or to reframe the question: how many consumers or citizens would miss 'big' creative marketing, if it disappeared altogether?

I think that there are a new ways to make, market and distribute goods and services – industrially and ethically different from what has come before – and that we need more arguments and studies of change and changeability.

It feels slightly out of step, to my mind, to want to return to 'proper' mass marketing, in a world in which many habits and values are being questioned intensely (a process both accelerated and convulsed by the COVID-19 pandemic.)

And so, I propose that what marketing effectiveness theory needs is greater open-mindedness, a re-focussing on the consumer and citizen – so that it can start to be true to their developing needs and desires.

One suggestion, with which I'll end, would be to investigate the marketing effectiveness of product provenance and delivery – in all its consumer, citizen, cultural and financial ramifications.