Blogging for food

Alastair Duncan

Dontcha just hate pseudo profundity? I’ve recently seen (again) the PowerPoint urban myth of the Chinese symbols shown as an answer to the economic conditions the marketing community and indeed the whole community faces. It really doesn’t wash. In fact, check out an incisive critique of this pictogram/linguistic fallacy. I know, I know, we work in the world of overclaim. We are all simple purveyors of seductive presentation technique. But I am also very keen on substantiation, evidence and consideration of the facts in making decisions around investing Clients’ money.

Today the OECD published stats that indicate the UK economy is in technical recession, according to the definition of recession as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Are we able to substantiate this in our own industry? Can we ‘create’ our way out of the gloom?The last Bellwether report back in July used the dramatic turn of phrase ‘worst downturn in marketing spend since 9/11’. It’s a whole two months to go till the next one, but I predict that it won’t be particularly favourable. On the other hand, I am not sure how slavish we should be in responding in a flippy floppy way to these quarterly reports. In Q2 last year, marketing spend was at its highest levels for three years. Not even six months later, it’s at its lowest. Now whilst this data is well qualified, I am of the view that we need to reflect on slightly longer term trends to help focus our minds, and indeed our investments, when it comes to planning.

Where are consumers spending their time? Where can we deliver the most engagement with a brand? Which is more important - providing a useful service from the brand (a brand utility in the fashionable parlance) or creating advertising to seduce consumers into believing the proposition? What is the most cost effective way of getting consumers to spend time interacting with the brand? Does our idea actually make a difference to the brand? These are great questions. It has to be enjoyable, challenging and exciting to answer them. But there remains no excuse for intellectual paucity in our answers.