If marketing is a product of its 20th century roots, what are they? In my last blog, I talked about economics, psychology, and technology.

Let’s start with technology – which defines what’s possible to do and in doing so shapes peoples’ perceptions of how things work and what’s important.

There are two crucial points here.

First, marketing’s heyday was the post-war years of the mass production of goods made possible by carbon-fuelled power: the motor car, the TV, the refrigerator etc. The big assumption this generated is that value is always embedded into a ‘product’ that’s made by a ‘producer’ and ‘sold’ to a ‘consumer’ who then ‘consumes’ it. Trouble is, if you peel away the surface credibility of these concepts, you quickly discover they are superficial and misleading. Every one of them is, in fact, a mental block which serves to mask the underlying logic and processes of real value creation.

Second, this was also an era when top down flows of information – epitomised by advertising-funded mass media – reached its zenith. Every development since the turn of the 20th century – from the steam powered printing press through radio, broadcast TV and on to cable, satellite had reinforced this trend. Even the early, publishing, days of the Internet did.

Given that ‘top down’ was effectively the only way information could flow, marketers could be forgiven for focusing their attention on ‘messaging’: deciding which messages to send to who, how. But the assumption that grew up – that ‘good marketing = effective messaging’ – is another mental block.

Neither of the above two formative conditions exist any more. We now know there is much more to value than products and that ‘consumers’ do a lot more than ‘consume’ – they can help us co-create too, for example. Meanwhile, ‘bottom up’ flows of information are rapidly become the pivotal mode of communication in our society.

These developments are not only changing the day-to-day practice of marketing. They also challenge its underlying theories and assumptions.

Alan Mitchell    www.ctrl-shift.co.uk