Over the past 50 or so years, a great many things have melted into a kind of sameness. Cars used to look vastly different from one another. A 1960 Corvette looked nothing like a 1960 Buick Electra, which looked nothing like a Ford Falcon.
Today, it’s difficult to tell one model car from another, minor variations in headlamp style aside. Data now tells carmakers what shapes are most aerodynamic and most appealing to consumers. Thus, the data spit out cars that look alike. Back in the day, it was a matter of designers convincing higher-ups that something as wild as the Corvette’s bullet-like silhouette would be a hit.
Similarly, marketing used to be a matter of talent and taste. Nobody majored in it in college. People in disciplines from writing, to art, to design came together to devise something that stood out, and that they believed would seize the public’s attention. Having to rely on fallible human insight and intuition generally drove these professionals to seek the new. The goal was to present potential consumers combinations of image and word they hadn’t seen before in order to make a lasting impression.
Today, we can use publicly available data to segment audiences down to the molecule, identifying what they’ve responded to in the past, and combine that with what they say they want in the future. With that data, we can use prefabricated, pre-existing elements to Frankenstein a marketing program that will fare at least as well as all the other marketing programs that have followed similar scripts. Risk is limited, and a certain level of performance almost guaranteed.
I see this in the processes of a great many clients. We’re regularly asked what best practices are and what competitors are doing. In essence, “what is everyone else doing,” or, “what has a self-styled ‘expert’ written on this topic.” That’s because you’re never wrong if you’re following accepted practices. If you’re seen to follow ‘best practices’ and fail, that failure is the system’s fault, not yours. Not to mention that in the corporate mind, the fact that you’re doing what everyone else is doing means that you’re doing the right thing – acceptable results taken on faith.
Back in the day, marketing campaigns could actually soak the public consciousness because we did not have the data tools we have today, and we were truly “broadcasting” – casting a wide net hoping to catch a few of the right fish mixed in with all the wrong ones. What we have now is clearly more efficient, more productive, and more profitable. Unfortunately, it is also a helluva lot less interesting and fun. All the cars look alike.
Leonce Gaiter – Vice-President, Content & Strategy
