Marketing

Brand used to mean the trust resulting from consistently high quality products or behaviour. Increasingly it means carefully managed spin. In addition, most marketing feels like being shouted at when you are trying to do something else. Seth Godin describes it as interruptive rather than permissive. Whether it is TV ads or hoardings on the street, businesses attempt to grab our attention while we are trying to do something else. Online banner ads and pop-ups on the web work on the same principle and most of us end up finding ways to block them.

Along comes social media and the next thing you know millions of people are having online conversations about everything under the sun – including the products they aspire to or have bought. Cue a rush of marketing departments, assisted by agencies, clamouring to become our “friends” online and to intrude on our conversations with yet more of the same interruptive thinking that they have been peddling for years! What we end up with is the 140 character press release. The same shouty content delivered in a new form on Twitter. People aren’t even liking companies’ Facebook pages – literally. Very few of them are pressing the like button in response to marketing campaigns. Trying to import old ways of connecting with customers into the new en....