Marketing In The New Decade. It's All Different Again.

If you'd like to see what brand babble is going to look like in the coming decade, you can't do much better than reading a recent piece of gobbledygook from Adweek called, "5 Marketing Principles Brands Should Embrace in 2010."

We learn that in the new decade...

"Marketing becomes the product and the product becomes the marketing."

Oh, good. For dinner tonight,  I'll start with a little Ketel One marketing cocktail, then I'll have me some steak marketing with baked potato marketing. Then I'll jump in the old Toyota marketing and go see some movie marketing. I hate this decade already.

We also learn that...

While brands need to apply the same rigor the human-centric approach design thinking requires and while actionable insights are key, they're only half of the equation.

I've got $10 for the first person who can find a coherent subject in that sentence.

Just like people, brands are a sum of their experience.

So brands have experiences now, do they? Who do you think had a better weekend -- Jif or I Can't Believe It's Not Butter?  I heard that Meineke had a bad experience. They went to Chili's marketing for dinner and wound up needing Pepto-Bismol marketing.

Of course, marketing in the new decade isn't so different from the last decade that it can't use a nice big dose of that mega-cliche from the last decade -- the "conversation"

Shift from singular, consistent messages to multiple coherent ideas, from simplistic, one dimensional, reduced executions to complex, multidimensional, rich executions... Join the movement shifting from campaign thinking to conversation thinking.

And finally...

Y&R's recent Brand Asset Valuator found a 90 percent erosion in brand differentiation over the last 10 years.... a staggering statement of our industry's failure to add value in the past decade.

Or a staggering example of what you get when you listen to the brand babblers who hijacked marketing in the past decade. And are apparently here to stay.

Shameless Self-Promotion Alert...
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