The Changing Nature of Marketing

If you want to read a great book that will help you understand the new culture,
pick up Chuck Brymer’s “The Nature of Marketing – Marketing to the Swarm as well as the Herd.” It has a lot of great insights into current attitudes and how to reach people with innovative action.

Brymer is president and CEO of DDB Worldwide, a well-known advertising and marketing agency with offices in nearly 100 countries. In the book, he cites examples from his company’s global experiences and talks about his many clients and their successes in communicating with their customers.

In the past decade we have seen the rise of viral marketing, where people spread brand messages between and among themselves at an accelerated pace. Brymer points out that we have started to talk about influence marketing where targeting the right key people or the right blogger can quickly spread the word about your brand. This is especially true today, when marketing co-exists in a world of alternate media and social networks.

Digital connectivity
Brymer writes that digital connectivity is creating consumers who behave less like individuals and more like a community. Today’s consumer posts to virtual forums, and one can predict that tomorrow’s consumer will be even more connected to a global community.

Though digital connectivity can give any brand tremendous leverage, Brymer believes it will also change the way you do business by removing a wall between your marketing and your brand image. Today, retailers are just one negative blog post away from consumers fleeing, and the humble customer is as powerful as your entire marketing department was in the past.

The power of social networks is the ultimate communications media, spreading the word across the globe at unprecedented speed. As a result, Brymer feels we have moved closer to the predictable behavior patterns of other species – specifically, animal swarms.

The new “human swarms” represent an evolutionary next step in marketing behavior as we are progressing from a herd of individual consumers to a collective organism that acts as one. Human beings are becoming more connected in their purchasing behavior. (There are wonderful examples from all over the globe, but I particularly like the reference to psychologist Carl Jung, who spoke of people having a “collective unconscious.”)

Marketing to social networks
Increasingly, the digital swarm we inhabit is devaluing privacy. Whereas in the past we wrote letters meant to be read by one person, the most personal and intimate aspects of our lives now appear on blogs and social network pages.

Digital communities are not just faceless mobs: they are social groups that have their own gestalt, personality and language. Brymer understands social networks and discusses specific marketing efforts that play to them.

The book (Palgrave McMillan, 2009, 205 pp.) provides an outline for creating a global brand and developing brand identity. Traditional marketing and branding continue to be important, Brymer writes, but one must have a deep understanding and a sensitivity to change to communicate to today’s swarm.