27 February 2009

The more things change …

SE Stuart Elliott of The New York Times does a good job highlighting the maxims “the more things change, the more they remain the same” and “there’s nothing new under the sun”:

Tropicana Discovers Some Buyers Are Passionate About Packaging
tropnew The PepsiCo Americas Beverages division of PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice ... The about-face comes after consumers complained about the makeover in letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls and clamored for a return of the original look.

Mr. Elliott aptly resurrects the uproar twenty-three years ago with the introduction of New Coke:

The original version was hastily brought back as Coca-Cola Classic and New Coke eventually fizzed out.

What amuses me: I keep hearing about the end of advertising as we know it because now ‘the consumer is in control’ and there are ‘brand ambassadors’ and other such nonsense.

Remember the nutty popularity of logo t-shirts in the 1980s? 

tshirts

I was told back then that this was the end of advertising. Who needed it when everybody you met was a walking billboard?   

Logo t-shirts are still around – but so is advertising, last I looked. 

With no historical perspective, you might think that all has changed because of the internet. But nothing has changed. It’s simply been supercharged.  Consumers have always had influence and share control of advertising, marketing,  product development.

Read about Jean Wade Rindlaub on The Advertising Hall of Fame website:

jwr Jean Wade Rindlaub
BBDO's long commitment to advertising and marketing research can be traced to Rindlaub. The innovative methods she developed to sound out consumers were adopted by BBDO and became widely modeled within the campbellsbusiness.

And if you watch the video, Ms. Rindlaub says, “I could tell you who really writes advertising. You'd be surprised.  It's you.”

Three years ago Jack Trout had this to say:

jt Tales From The Marketing Wars A third-party endorsement of your product has always been the Holy Grail. It's more believable. In prior days, we used to try and find the "early adapters" for a product. We figured they had big mouths and loved to tell their friends and neighbors about their new widget.

The New Coke fiasco happened before the WWW, before email was ubiquitous, before IM and Twitter. Post Offices and telephones worked fine. They still do.

What the internet has done (among a few other things) is create new multimedia playing fields for advertising, marketing, public relations, research - just like the printing press, radio, and television.

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