I started this post with a small lie, but that’s okay in marketing. Be honoust; would you have read this piece of writing had I called it ‘Jerome McCarthy, a misunderstood man’? No of course not. Mccarthy was the man that introduced the ‘four p’s of marketing’and Kotler was the one that ran of with the credits and the dollars. Which is also okay in marketing. But, I am sure you are absolutely dying to find out why I’d say that mr. Kotler (or mr. McCarthy)  is misunderstood.

Well,  a couple of days ago, our vacuum cleaner broke down. When we bought it, we were on a bit of a budget, so it was one of those cheap ones. At first, it worked okay and we figured ‘no one makes crap products nowadays, so what the heck’. But, within three years of service it broke down, in the middle of the housecleaning process and on a Sunday. Fixing the problem would not be easy. Fortunately, we ‘d always kept our old vacuum cleaner. A Philips one, handed down form one of the parents, to be used to vacuum the car or something. It had been been sitting in a cold, moist shed for five years, after it had been ‘in use’ for over fifteen years. This was one abused vacuum cleaner. We kept our fingers crossed, switched it on… not only did it work, it worked beautifully. It worked better then the crap machine had ever done. Hurrah for Philips.

This short event made me think back of one of my first clients I ever worked for when I was a marketing consultant. A grey suited, grey haired, dull (somewhere below the) middle marketing manager by the name of Peter D. The client was Philips. The assignment was to help mr. D. in getting a good perspective on their product; CD rewritables (I think many of us know how that one worked out for Philips…). Since I was new to the field, I hadn’t yetr lost my youthful enthusiasm and I told mr. D. about the Philips television I had at home. My dad worked for Philips and was a bit of a gadget freak, so we bought one of the first colour tv’s ever made. This thing was about 25 years old. And, like the vacuum cleaner, I had it in my house and it was still working. Mr. D. responded with a joke that really surprised me; “Well that certainly shows that it’s a good thing marketeers are taking over around here. Those technicians would have run this company to the ground. Har-har-har…” (well, something like that any way) What he meant was, that since consumers don’t expect a tv to work for that long, but -say- ten years or so, it would have been better for Philips if their tv’s lasted for only fifteen years (five years longer then expected, but ten years shorter that was, obviously, possible), their customers would still be thrilled and would buy another Philips tv. At that point, I couldn’t realy put my finger on it, but I do recall instinctively knowing that mr. D. was a complete douche-bag.

I think mr. D. was what you may call ‘the average marketing exec.’. At university he read his copy of  ‘marketing principles’, sort of read about the ‘four p’s’ and received moderate, but sufficient grades to pass and get a nice job at a leading multinational, where he made a couple of small climbs along the corporate ladder. However; he had never understood what marketing should truly be about. He could never understand a concept such as ‘in a great company, marketing could be obsolete, since it doesn’t add anything’. Things like ‘the experience economy’ is something consumers had -unknowingly- been into for decades but no one had named it yet. A marketing guru found out, gave it a name, and many of his followers made a big buck, selling an idea to corporations that was totally useless to them, but no one actually figured that out. consumers make their own experiences and if you’re lucky: your company is invited. Back to the product bit.

Philips did do something wrong concerning that colour tv. It wasn’t that they invested too much in technology to make sure it would still be playing after thirty years (which it does), but they never invested enough in R&D to come up with something new and revolutionary enough so that I would want to pass my old tv on to someone else, in favour of that new product. Consider the computer industry. When was the last you bought a new pc because the ol done was broken? In my case, this never happened. I discarded several pc’s in perfect working condition (I donated them to school in developing areas) because I wanted that newer, better product. So, I’m still buying stuff from the company that I feel connected with, and I don’t have to throw out all sorts of old broken tech-stuff. Seems to me, everybody wins.

So, now I’m off to buy a new vacuum cleaner. Not because the old Philips one is crap, but because there’s something better out there. Lighter, more silent and more efficient in use of electricity. First, I ‘ll check if Mr. D. is still working for Philips and if he is, if he’s been transferred to vacuum cleaners. If he’s not, I’m going to buy the Philips one.

That’s the actual pay-off of the Lidl supermarket: ‘Lidl is cheap’. and when looking at the yellow and blue logo, all the boxes in the places where there should be shelves and the tiles on the floors, you know it’s true. This is one cheap supermarket. But in the case of Lidl, that might not be a bad thing.

It’s easy to draw a parallel between Lidl and Aldi, the other German ‘discounty’ supermarket. No major brand names, almost everything under ‘made up’ private labels. But there are big differences as well. Lidl has a choice of ‘biological’, ‘Fair trade’ and even ‘ecological’ products whereas Aldis generally have none. Where Aldi usually makes the headlines because of the high levels of poison find on there fruit’n veg, Lidl was rewarded by the Dutch watchdog program (Kassa) for having the best (in terms of biological) vegetables of all Duthc supermarkets.

In marketing terms, Lidl is going the other way around as the other supermarkets. Traditionally, a supermarket would communicate on it’s quality and once you got there, you’d find out that they might be affordable as well. Marketeers try to convince advertisers that we are in an ‘experience economy’ and that shopping at your supermarket should also be an ‘experience’. Lidl probably flipped them the finger and told them to piss off. Good choice, I’d say. Lidl is cheap. And apparently you can get quality stuff there as well, a lot of which is fair trade, which makes it hard to slag them off because of preying on developing nations or child labour. I’d say that’s quite a clear position there taking. Shopping for groceries might just b shopping for groceries. I’ll get my experiences somewhere else, thank you very much.

(ps, obviously there are some skeletons in Lidls closets, but aren’t there always?)

I am sorry,

A scientific fact: in risk-communication (like campaigning to stop smoking, or avoid drug-use) you will reduce your beneficial effects greatly when your campaign intends to scare your audience. Fear is not productive. So, showing black lungs in your public service announcement will not have an effect on people quitting smoking. But, this is only true for mass-media campaigns. If you were to show a picture of the same black lungs in a face to face educational setting, it’s a different story. But in those settings you would also give people tips on alternative behaviour, on the odds of actually getting sick, on the social norm concerning smoking, et cetera. The picture does not have to convey the entire message. (another thing that does not work, by the way: advocating abstinence as an hiv (or other sti) prevention program. Also scientifically proven. And did you know that the prevalence of sti among religious groups is higher than among non-religious groups, in the same country?)

Anyway; our world faces a lot of dangers in the coming few decades. Besides global warming we also face the threat of nuclear technology ending up the wrong hands, there are less and less fish in the ocean, there are more and more deserts… It all looks quite negative. At the same time, we’re not doing anything. I mean; some people are, but on the whole… We’re all still getting in our cars, we keep buying cheap meat, we make hard copies of every file we get and throw the paper out right after. It’s like we’re dancing on the volcano. Nobody seems to care about the future of our planet. We say we do, but we don’t ‘walk the walk‘.

I’m going to pitch an unusual suspect for this lack of action; the internet. And I will have a hard time explaining why. I’ll do so in two parts, starting with – appropriately – part one: The internet gave us -first- a lot of extra media-competition, and now it has given us a form of media-anarchy. The traditional news media have to fight to get and keep their audience. And how do we do that? With a lot of thrill seeking, scandals and negativity (to explain why that is the case, would be whole different posting). The media-anarchy (referred to as web 2.0) means that everyone is now a media-exec. We are all bloggers. And what bloggers generally get most attention? The ones that give us the dirt and the scandals. The ones that teach us that everyone we know is probably an unreliable, lying piece of… So everyone is focussing on negative news. Everyone that’s trying to bring any form of positive news is probably a weed-smoking, tree-hugging hippy that’s to be (verbally) attacked and ridiculed.

Part two of the explanation: up until about fifteen years ago we all had to rely on a select number of editors in chief for our news. Our world view depended entirely on the opinion of a handful of well-educated professionals of what was ‘news’ and what wasn’t. The normal response would be: the internet-model is superior to that. Now you no longer have to depend on the traditional media to give you an insight of the condition of the world… you can see for yourself on millions of websites or on obscure digital channels we can now receive with our satellite dish. This is entirely true. But what if most of the news you get to see is bad news? What if all you see is that all over the world there is violence, crime, and everyone all over the world is abusing our planet? Wouldn’t that just mean that you would feel that it does not make one bit of difference what you do as an individual to help out? There wouldn’t be any point.

In all honesty… I don’t have much faith in this hypothesis myself. But that’s no reason to not post it. That’s just web 2.0

I’m guessing a lot of you, dear readers, are not very familiar with the ‘cradle to cradle’ concept. The reason for that could be, other than just a mild distaste for anything ‘eco-friendly’, that marketing and C2C (hey, it’s sounds a lot more interesting now, doesn’t it?) seem a bit contradictory. Let me explain: C2C is eco-friendly but does not approach that from a moral high ground, but from simple economical sense: producing waste will cost you money. If everything you produce has an economical value, because it ads to the biosphere you will therefor, make more money. All pollution is stuff a producer made, for which he does not get paid… so that doesn’t make sense. It’s all just a matter of design, good design will not reduce waste, it will get rid of it.

How would this work in practice? Some examples; icecream packaging that melts when it gets defrosted. A company has added tiny seed to the packaging so that every time you throw the wrapper away you are spreading plants, therefor adding to the biosphere (I guess there are a couple of foreseeable problems to this, watch the documentary ‘Darwins nightmare’ about the East-African Lake Victoria for an obvious example, but still). Another example, a car that runs on compressed oxygen; the more you drive around, the cleaner the air gets. Anyone who has ever seen a photo of the smog over LA of any major Chinese city understands how this would help. It’s possible to compress the air making use of ‘clean’ energy so there would beno waste. And Ford Company is, in the meantime, designing a car that is completely C2C as well. Traditionally, to produce a 3000 pound car, you would use 50.00

Sounds pretty amazing huh? If you want to learn more, there’s loads of stuff about it on the net and I strongly recommend the book by the C2C founding fathers, William McDonough and Micheal Braungarten.

So, now to marketing. Marketing should be defined as: tricking people into buying crap they neither want nor need, with the forever unfulfilled promise of finally satisfying the consumers’ unhappiness. I know we’re all taught at university that marketing is about listening to our customers and that the customer is in the driving seat and that this is the story we tell each other and other out in the open, but this is, actually, BS. 95% of all marketing activity is about pushing unwanted crap, so that should actually be the definition. The ones of you that are reading this are obviously responsible for the remaining 5% so I’m sure we have no need for discussing this matter any further. So, it would seem, that the outcome of any marketing activity is: waste. And that’s not very C2C. Unless…

McDonough and Braungarten already knew that it’s not possible to use 100% of everything you put in, in the end product, some stuff will get discarded. So they said: waste is food. (remember the icecream wrappers?) You may need water to cool your production, but there is no reason why this water should get polluted. It is actually quite possible to have cleaner water go out of your factory then went in. I think we can consider ‘market segmentation’ and ‘targeting’ the equivalent of ‘reducing polution’. Marketeers try to, or have to, limit their polluting activities, not because they care, but because it makes economical sense. But try to ‘think outside of the box’ for a minute (it is something that’s supposedly in your job description isn’t it?). Your job is to sell crap, why not try to add value to (make food of) that crap as well as as the selling activities as well. I am quite sure that McDonalds could think of something better to put in their Happy Meals than Disney puppets made out of plastic. I am quite sure they have research on how long it takes for their gifts to be thrown away. If you make the give-away not just biodegradable but also add something that actually adds to the biosphere, that would help enormously. Or how about; you can return it to McDonalds so they can reuse the arts for new toys to give away? While we’re at it; why don’t they sell their burgers in stuff that adds to the biosphere? And how about those coupons that are handed out on the streets? How much of that is thrown away? Imagine all the seeds, leaves and branches that birds tear of trees and drop… that’s not pollution, that’s dding to the biosphere. Everyone that buys from Mcdonalds or receives leaflets or coupons from McDonalds could be like those birds. Without having to think about it, just throw all that stuff away (just like they do now). The architect Mcdonough likes to view buildings as trees; adding to their ecosphere with all its activities. All marketing activities could do that too. Just think outside of the hamburgerbox.