I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to start writing my personal blog (as distinct from blogs about my company or my beautiful daughter). Laziness, probably, and because it’s hard to find a good-looking blog template. But also, over the last few months, I’ve spent altogether too much time being annoyed by some of the more unthinking hyperbole around the ways in which social media are reshaping marketing.
Everyone’s a believer in what we now call the tipping point, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except like most intelligent and insightful theories it gets overused and misappropriated to imply radical change in places in which there often isn’t any. The prevailing sentiment about marketing at the web summits and conferences I sometimes attend is that it’s caught up in a sea change that is shifting control of brands and their messaging from the top to the bottom. It’s this idea that I’d like to play with here, primarily so I can try and understand what’s actually happening rather than simply what people with loud voices are saying is happening.
By the way, the name of my blog comes from that overquoted line in The Sun Also Rises, Mike Campbell’s response to Bill Gorton’s question about how he went bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” What I love about this quotation is the sense of working back from a cataclysmic event through the tiny increments that caused it, and what I find frustrating about claims such as ‘marketing is dead’ or ‘the long tail is reshaping branding’ is that they seek to gather up the increments to insist that radical change has happened when it plainly hasn’t, yet.
Post a Comment