5 new rules for marketing by Unilever CMO Simon Clift

Five new rules for marketing

The flat-earth, digitized world described by Unilever CMO Simon Clift is one in which the marketing norms have changed. Here are Ad Age's "New Rules." Feel free to argue or send us additional rules you think you should be added to the list.

1. Listening to consumers is more important than talking at them. As Mr. Clift said, "We may be ahead of our competitors, but we're most definitely behind consumers." The consumer is not a moron, she's the person defining your brand.
   
2. You can't hide the corporation behind the brand anymore -- or even fully separate the two. Even this editor's creaking computer only took 0.13 seconds to show that Philip Morris is owned by Altria Group. Welcome to radical transparency, where bad corporate behavior will damage your brands, and vice versa.
   
3. PR is a primary concern for every CMO and brand manager. If "marketing" and "PR" are not the same department, tear down the wall. Spend time deciding whether PR is underleveraged in your organization.
   
4. Cause marketing isn't about philanthropy, it's about "enlightened self-interest," as Mr. Clift puts it. That doesn't mean it doesn't count. Don't be ashamed of your profit motive, because great branding and doing good are increasingly one and the same.
   
5. Social media is not a strategy. You need to understand it, and you'll need to deploy it as a tactic. But remember that the social graph just makes it even more important that you have a good product. Put another way: The volume and quality of your earned media will be directly proportional to the impact and quality of your product and ideas.

Send your "new rules" to jbloom@adage.com.

Comments

[Terence Chan]

I increasingly find that CMOs have a gift of the gap more than a gift of implementation.

All 5 so called "new rules" are nothing more than a flinched rehash of what is already being implemented by the world's leading brands who are already long down the road on a very rough highway of testing and learning.

Simon Clift is being nothing more than an opportunistic lemming scared crap of being fired by his equally opportunistic bosses for not saying the right things.

I'm sorry, but to call it the "Five new rules of marketing" is total parasitic crap.

The "5 rules of the lemming" might be a more appropriate title for this self glorifying "throw gaunlet to the industry" speech in the recent Age Age digital conference.

Working on this right now for MediaBlog.com, the path is more dangerous than it is sugar coated to be.

Thanks for raising this.

[Paul Ashby]

They are still trying to kick life back into the old one.
Forget all the talk of post-recession rebuilding. We are still advertising with no accountability and must now reduce our expectations
The coming nonsense is that when this recession is over, countries such as America & Britain should seek and find our salvation in (in what will become a buzz phrase of 2009-10) a "new Marketing model".
Wrong. Actually we're just stuffed. Marketing & Advertising hit a tree. There is no replacement advertising model for us to drive off in. We must bash out the dents, clear the broken glass, remove the bumper from the front wheel, and limp on as best we can. We should accommodate ourselves to that prospect
Instead, as our prosperity sinks, the Marketing gurus rhetoric will go skyward. "New challenges", "a new vision", "post-millennial economy", "thinking outside the box" ... "new technology" how wearisome this inspirational PowerPoint pap becomes. Already I can hear the so-called great and the good of the (failed) Marketing & Advertising community boasting of the next generation of marketing thrust.
Melancholy will be the spectacle of a range of middle-aged-to-elderly marketing & advertising throwbacks burbling about life changes and sea changes and gear changes and step changes for American & British Marketing. "Post-recession Britain ... new age ... new marketing dispensation ... recalibrate ... re-balance ... blah, blah, blah." Oh boy, is this nonsense going to sound wise. The riff will be that Western Marketing, like America & Britain's must reinvent themselves.
Behind the curve, and banging the table as ever, they all have not yet latched on to the rhetoric of the "new economic model". They are still trying to kick life back into the old one.
So the talk until recently has been about "kick-starting" the old economy. This mindless attempt to return to routine is an indication either of the absence of imagination, or of panic. But as it becomes apparent even to the Marketing & Advertising community that there is to be no return to that golden decade of no hard choices and uninterrupted growth together with Top Down Management techniques that have failed miserably. Although (the argument will concede) the old rust-belt industries of the 20th century had to go, the West turned its back on industry rather too readily. We were bedazzled by Marketing services: fool's gold from Mad Ave & Soho.
We need (wait for it) a new Marketing model. First, we must (argh) "rebalance" our economy. Media Agencies must seek out (key words) "a new generation" of shiny new media strengths, a second-wave advertising renaissance.
What, then, are these strengths? Our talent (runs the argument) for (key word) "innovation"; an "IT" (key word) generation; the potential of our existing (key word) "creative" agencies and (key words) "high added-value" marketing activity; and our (key words) "genius for invention". Vital to all this will be (key words) "skills", "training" and "education". We should remind ourselves, too, of that inestimable resource available to our economy: English as a (key words) "world language".
And it will all be just so much hot air. What is it, precisely, that we do so much better than any other country, althought I must admit that all the trade magazines say at one time or another that " American & British Advertising is the best in the world". Whatever that means!

This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily, together with a total lack of accountability so that it took a while for the market to rumble. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed. The collapse of confidence is not irrational; it's the correction to a long run of irrational confidence. All that stuff about the emerging Asian giants wasn't just phrasemaking for party conference speeches. It was true. We're falling behind. We face a mountain of debt: the difference between the life we are able to sustain and the life we were enjoying.
Marketing people, having misled the customers for so long must now explain a reduction in their standard of living. The great task facing the next generation of Top-Down Management is to help the country to recognise and embrace its fate: that we should get poorer, and slip with as good a grace as possible into the world's second league. Yes, there is a rebalancing required: a rebalancing of popular expectation.

"Television killed advertising" here I detail just how much more effective interactive communication is when compared to conventional advertising and details the results of a research investment in excess of £5 m.

Having invested over $10 million in independent research, Paul Ashby is ideally suited to present the case for the widespread use of interactive marketing communication. The research investment has proved conclusively that one exposure to an interactive "event" is far more effective in all key measurements, than traditional advertising. Paul made this investment because has established that Interactive Communication, properly executed, can be totally accountable, unlike all forms of advertising! You can contact Paul at: paul.ashby@yahoo.com

Discover more on http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com

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A client sent me this yesterday. It's a single, six-minute shot of a man walking along a road in what looks like Scotland, telling the story behind a brand. This clip is instructive on two levels. First, it's technically really impressive -- the timing is perfect, the delivery is terrific, and it's a masterful work of film making.