Sir John Hegarty: ‘Marketing is letting us down’
Sir John Hegarty has told a room full of senior marketers that while we are living in an “incredible period of time” in which “technology is coming at us in ways that are unimaginable” audiences believes the work marketers are doing is “getting worse”.
Speaking at the Global Marketing Conference in Sydney yesterday, the ad veteran and founder and creative partner of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) said: “Marketing has been letting us down for a very, very long time. Our audience believes what we’re producing is getting worse.
“A lot of people say what’s happened over the last 15 years with technology, has it revolutionised the communications industry?
“I really don’t genuinely think it has, I think what it has done is liberated the communications industry in the way you can do things, in the way you can talk to people.”
Sounds like a taxi driver complaining about the traffic….
“A bad idea costs the same as a good idea.” Amen.
Hey Marketing Director sounds like you don’t understand marketing so you like process so you can hide behind it.
Sadly “Marketing Director” you may actually work in the industry in a job that has that title. A great example of what Hegarty is talking about.
Nassim Taleb would agree: You can’t “process” your way to innovation and/or success. You have to tinker your way there. Rigid process is usually the death of tinkering.
The best marketers get this.
Borrowing from Porter, many marketers are now confusing operational effectiveness for viable strategic differentiation.
“OE competition shifts the productivity frontier outward, effectively raising the bar for
everyone. But although such competition produces absolute improvement in operational effectiveness, it leads to relative improvement for no one.”
“What we now have in our industry is procurement taking the value out of everything.” – could not agree more!