Hugh MacLeod’s recent questions for Mark Earls prompted me to buy Mark’s first book "Welcome To The Creative Age – Bananas, Business and the Death of Marketing" - the book which Hugh says changed his life.
If I was expecting to be blown away from the first page I was disappointed. Instead, Mark builds his case about creativity through the first chapter until thirty pages in he’s exploding three popular myths about the so-called creative personality (they’re not prodigies, anti-social loners or one-offs who "just know what to do") and I’m hooked.
Mark goes on to outline the history of marketing and the emergence of branding. Illustrating his points with stories about IKEA, Brian Eno, ARM and Apple, he talks about the shortcomings of brands and why advertising doesn’t work how we think it does. He touches on complexity and psychology, the War for Talent and designing great places to work. And although he cites Collins and Porras, he acknowledges the criticisms of their work.
If I was expecting to be blown away from the first page I was disappointed. Instead, Mark builds his case about creativity through the first chapter until thirty pages in he’s exploding three popular myths about the so-called creative personality (they’re not prodigies, anti-social loners or one-offs who "just know what to do") and I’m hooked.
Mark goes on to outline the history of marketing and the emergence of branding. Illustrating his points with stories about IKEA, Brian Eno, ARM and Apple, he talks about the shortcomings of brands and why advertising doesn’t work how we think it does. He touches on complexity and psychology, the War for Talent and designing great places to work. And although he cites Collins and Porras, he acknowledges the criticisms of their work.
Some great points:
- Commonsense should tell you that unless your company has at least 50% of the market, your results will be affected more by what other companies do in the marketplace than what your company does.
- We need to abandon the "Analyse - Think - Talk (Do)" paradigm and replace it with "Believe – Do – Think – Talk – Do again".
And on how advertising works:
- "…advertising doesn’t tend to work by changing our opinions… What we think about a product tends to follow our usage behaviour, not the other way around"
- "…the most important contribution to effective advertising is the creative contribution (John Philip Jones)… it’s novelty and not the message itself."
- "the most likely advertising research measure to move in the real world… is… 'advertising salience' – the sense I get that this company is doing quite a bit of advertising these days, all of which knock the traditional awareness and persuasion measure into the sea (and rightly so)."
A fascinating book for anyone interested in where marketing might be heading.
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