Contagious

The Nature of Marketing

By Chuck Brymer

December 12, 2008 Contagious editor Paul Kemp‐Robertson reviews DDB President Chuck Brymer's new book.

“Anything invented before you were 18 has been there forever. Anything that turns up before you're 30 is new and exciting. Anything after that is a threat to the world and must be destroyed!"

Born as I was in 1967, I feel safely qualified to use this observation from digital media consultant Jim Griffin (www.onehouse.com) when speaking at ad industry seminars. It gets straight to the heart of what’s been wrong with the marketing industry for the past eight years.

Put simply, the audience ran ahead of the advertiser. Too many brands were being controlled by a generation whose careers were rooted in a system that, fundamentally, had changed little in fifty years.

Consumers meanwhile, empowered by the liberating effects of digital technology, had begun to adopt new technologies, create new spaces to connect with each other and were ignoring the rules about where to watch entertainment content and how to source their favourite music. They’d started to favour brands like Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook and MySpace: brands that were being built not by traditional advertising and promotion techniques, but rather the 21st century tenets of service, speed, community, transparency and trust. In contrast, many traditional marketers acted like rabbits caught in the headlights.

Chuck Brymer’s The Nature of Marketing serves as a powerfully argued wake‐up call to those marketers who have erred on the side of caution but who now recognise that relationships with consumers have become conversations with a collective intelligence.

It is a deftly written, well‐ structured book peppered with compelling case studies from across DDB’s worldwide network. Brymer is clearly a paid‐up member of the Gladwell school of anecdotes and pop psychology. Several chapters begin with tales from the history books that add context and texture to the challenges facing the modern marketer. This adds a distinctly human and persuasive tone.

The bulk of the book will not offer much fresh information to the average Contagious subscriber, for whom we have been tracking emerging trends and technologies since launching in 2004. However, it does provide an excellent summary of the radical changes encountered by Adland as it switches from creating communications to creating communities. The case studies provide plenty of insights and reassuring metrics for even the most cautious brand owner.

The final third of book is where the meat lies. Here, Brymer provides a ‘blueprint for a consumer‐driven society', setting out a coherent set of principles that encourage advertisers to value influence over interruption. He states the case for agencies and advertisers to introduce the new role of ‘Chief Community Officer’ ‐ someone who oversees the relationship between brands and the communities who swarm around them.

My only quibble is the cover design. For an agency with a creative heritage as proud and enduring as DDB’s, the jacket for The Nature of Marketing looks like it was designed by a procurement officer who’s just spent his Saturday morning at a ‘Photoshop for Beginners’ workshop at the local high school. The book’s content certainly has mainstream appeal, but I expected a tad more creative rigour in the design. And for a publication that argues that successful marketing ‘must become part of a collaborative online consciousness’ where’s the dedicated blog or official microsite where readers can continue the conversation? The Nature of Marketing deserves to live beyond the printed page.

http://issuu.com/natureofmarketing/docs/natureofmarketingexcerpt

By Paul Kemp‐Robertson / Co‐founder & editorial director / Contagious Communications / www.contagiousmagazine.com Reprinted with permission.