John Fanning on why marketing strategies basically remain the same
If you were going to start a magazine in Ireland you could hardly have picked a better year than 1990. As Marketing first saw the light of day, the nation was still basking in the aftermath of Italia ’90 and the collective madness of a few months earlier exemplified by lines of abandoned cars on the way to Dublin airport as everyone took leave of their vehicles and their senses and headed to Italy to give it a lash with Jack and the lads.
I was at the first match Ireland played in a World Cup finals in Cagliari (thanks again 98FM!) when we hammered England in a 1-1 draw. When it was all over, we were still celebrating as folk lined the streets of Dublin to welcome our heroes home and honour Nelson ‘Ooh, Ah, Paul McGrath’s Da’ Mandela being given the Freedom of the City.
We had finally kicked over the traces of our long historical sense of grievance and our new self-confidence was again in evidence later in the year when we elected Mary Robinson, closely identified with a socially liberal agenda, as our first woman President.
Free at last: In the year Marketing was launched, the world celebrated the release of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. At Italia ’90, Jack Charlton’s team reached the quarter finals only to lose out 1-0 to the hosts in Rome.
That critical year also saw a new renaissance in Irish culture with the opening of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa in the Abbey Theatre, which later became a world-wide sensation, the publication of John McGahern’s acclaimed Amongst Women and Colm Toibin’s first novel, South. Novelist John Banville summed up the mood of the time… “Roused from the slack of centuries we rubbed our eyes, gave ourselves a shake, went down the stairs to join the wild party that had been going on in the rest of Europe in the 1980’s,” Banville wrote. For the next decade and a half we partied and propertied until it all came tumbling down in the late noughties. Farewell Celtic Tiger and good riddance.
Irish advertising availed of the new dispensation by contributing to the gaiety of the nation with some memorable ads, including Guinness’s ‘Anticipation’, Bord na Mona’s ‘Marino Waltz’, the anarchic National Lottery with D’Unbelievables and the Kerrygold ad, left, that contributed a new phrase to the language: “Who’s taking the horse to France?”
Two highly-acclaimed radio campaigns were launched; Old Mr Brennan and Barry’s Tea ‘Train Set’ by Catherine Donnelly, both of them still keeping up with Marketing magazine. During the next 25 years, Ireland experienced the dizzy heights of an unprecedented economic boom and the depressing depths of an unforgiving bust. Needless to say, marketing communications was significantly more affected by the bust with severely reduced budgets and a concentration on short-term sales effects and a reduced commitment to long-term brand-building. But it was digital and the rise of social media channels that created most impact.
It’s hard to imagine a world without e-mails, Google, Facebook, YouTube and the rest but they’ve all been introduced in the last 25 years. The digital revolution has re-shaped our business in many ways. It has increased our ability to align budgets to more precisely targeted consumers at more effective times of the day or night – 24/7, as they say – and often in more precisely defined locations, or ‘geo-fencing’ if you prefer.
There have also been significant changes in how consumers receive marketing communications messages, in particular with the traditional TV screen under increasing threat and the smartphone looking like the likely long term winner. These changes have been accompanied by claims that the consumer has also fundamentally changed.
Consumers nowadays are more sophisticated in their understanding and appreciation of marketing, requiring dialogue with advertisers rather than being prepared to just listen and only being prepared to engage with ironic, self-deprecating content. But I’m afraid to say that I’m not convinced that this amounts to anything more than the age old phenomenon of youth throwing shapes, wanting to be different and ‘cool’.
Today’s Harold’s Cross hipsters are no different from the rebels without a cause in the 1950’s and the rebels with loads of causes in the 1960’s. The argument that the so-called younger consumers want to be more defined by what they do than what they own has some validity, but this has more to do with the effects of the worst recession since the 1930’s than the digital or social revolution witnessed in more recent years.
I’m less convinced by the ‘millennial difference’ than by the perennial wisdom recently advanced by an eminence grise of US advertising, Keith Reinhart, who reminded us that while technology changes, human nature doesn’t; “there’s a big distinction between creating a buzz and creating a brand, between a one-off stunt and an enduring idea, between an algorithm and an insight into human nature, between mere contact and true connection, between big data and a big idea”. Marketing communications is still about connecting people with brands; it was in 1990, it is in 2015 and it will still be in 2040.
John Fanning lectures on branding and marketing communications at the UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business and chairs Bord Bia’s Brand Forum
