Marketing has completely changed...

Except it hasn't.

The bigger picture is being missed because we are so concerned with the camera.

As a student and observer of marketing and related content, it is evident we are the “pick-me kids” on the playground (credit to twelve-year-old twins in my extended family for the term.) We, as marketers, are doing everything we can to get noticed and picked. We want to be in the in-crowd. (Yes, I mixed a 1960’s reference with one from the TikTok generation.)

We make sweeping statements like my first line above, or that some new tactic will revolutionize everything, or we talk big about metrics and performance.

The thing is marketing itself hasn’t fundamentally changed at all. We have a product (P1), for which we are presumably charging a market-established price (P2), within our corner of the market… our “place” (P3), and we find ways to promote it (P4). The classic 4 P’s model still holds up because it’s a broad blueprint.

I would be pretty dumb (and I don’t think I am) to suggest that nothing has changed in marketing, because much has. But most of the advances are in the tools at our disposal. Getting ever better at targeting customers? Tool. Using AI to enhance our efforts and doing things that manually weren’t worth it? Tool. Finding our way into new and emerging media? Tool.

We have allowed the latest tool buzz in our biz to become synecdoche. Pardon my word-nerdery but if you aren’t one yourself, it means when a part comes to represent the whole. We keep letting the latest tools define our worth as a whole. If a company isn’t touting its AI marketing capabilities, is it even a company? Yet, AI is a tool to deliver on the broad goals of marketing which have not ultimately changed. But the more obsessed with the tool we become, the more we get distracted from the goal.

Let me shift to an example which has reached me third hand so I can’t cite details. Basically, leadership of Product Z was tired of the lack of concrete attribution of spend to branding efforts. The leadership went to a seminar and heard about Performance Marketing. This seemed like an answer to all their issues, and on return, shifted most of their paid media budget into performance marketing. And Product Z results spiked. Leadership pointed to the results and proclaimed, “we are performance media company!” But in a very short time, results dipped below where they originally started. All the product seekers at that point had found the product and made their purchases. More investment was put into performance media and sales remained relatively flat.

What happened was an unspoken synecdoche, where performance marketing came to stand for all of marketing.

Spending only in performance is setting you up to constantly chase immediate results. In many cases, this can be a cheaper option at least from a media buying standpoint. But the there are other costs that are harder to calculate. For Product Z, they were reaching an audience with ads directing them to buy but were no longer telling them why to buy from you. Presumably Product Z’s competitors did some of that. If all I know about Product Z is to buy it now for $1, yet Product Y is eco-conscious and sells for $1 also, I’m more likely to buy Product Y.

Synecdoche is allowing the tools to take the credit for the knowledge that good marketers have studied, practiced, and evolved for years.

So, when it comes to staffing, who are you hiring? Are you going out and finding people good at using tools but can’t read a blueprint? Someone once told me you can’t teach people to have an eye for artistry, but you can teach people how to use a camera. This is what makes a photographer, the two things together.

Tools are always changing, just like cameras, so hiring for a camera operator is temporary, while hiring a photographer is going to deliver more than just a part of the whole.

Ultimately, marketing completely changes all the time, but only within itself. What may be the answer today, may shift tomorrow, and back again the next. The trick is to understand the broader needs and balance. That is the bigger picture, which is why you need a photographer in the first place.