I don’t know whether these radio spots were in the works prior to these recent events, but for the sake of the agency that developed them, I hope they were.  Given the concerns people are likely to have around bus safety, those spots are doing more harm than good. I don’t even recall if they mentioned safety, but I do remember my first thought in response to “Why aren’t you riding Greyhound?”, and I suspect most people’s reaction would be similar – “I don’t want to get stabbed or decapitated!”

Greyhound should be running a series of damage control ads much like Maple Leaf has been doing since the Listeriosis outbreak and reassuring people that its safe to take the bus -  not reminding people why they’re not.

The “dumb customer” basically equates to the mass market, the great unwashed and the homogenized consumer. The type of consumer that can be conveniently characterized as John Q. Public , Suzy Homemaker or Joe Six Pack and that marketeers look at as one big cliche waiting to be told what to buy. Of course this kind of customer doesn’t really exist and probably never existed, consumer behavior is complex, it can’t just be reduced to dumb and smart, mass and niche. This is even more the case in era where media is more fragmented and people can form communities of thousands dedicated to the most obscure pursuits and are continually finding ways to differentiate themselves through the consumption choices they make. Each of these communities is a tribe that speaks it’s own dialect and if you don’t speak their language they will ignore you.

Today’s marketing has to be multilingual, it has to be able to talk to a diverse array of consumers and engage them by speaking their language. No more is it a case of one speaking to the many, it is a case of one speaking to many groups of comparatively few.

I think it’s often the case that there are dumb marketeers rather than dumb customers. Marketeers who are dumb in the sense of being unable to speak, unable to communicate and unable to engage consumers.

Well I was busily attending to the tasks of life in the world of a small company when I got a message from my blogging amigo Chris (the other half of the Crowdspark dynamic duo).

He pointed me to an interesting article at Tom Asacker’s blog about authenticity, which got me thinking. Basically Tom makes the argument that Unilever is inauthentic in the way it presents itself because it shows two different faces to the world through it’s marketing for it’s Dove and Axe brands. Tom argues that:

“Dove is a Unilever brand. But guess what? So is Axe. Uniliver’s Dove celebrates women by encouraging them to take pleasure in their individual beauty. Unilever’s Axe portrays women as a ditsy, sex crazed collective. Same company. Two world views. Or at least, that’s how they present themselves to us through their marketing. Truth be told, as consumers, we really have no clue. So pardon the cynicism, but Unilever, therefore, is not being authentic.”

As I read this and digested it, the thought struck me that Tom’s perspective is problematic because each of these Unilever brands has it’s own narrative and speaks to a distinct audience. Unilever just happens to house these different narratives. One could compare Unilever to a compendium of short stories in that sense. It is merely an umbrella entity that encompasses a stable of brands all of which tell different stories to different audiences. Given that, it wouldn’t be fair to call them inauthentic just because the narratives behind their brands do not necessarily mesh.

Unilever is the parent company of the Axe and Dove and therefore the relationship is akin to that of parent and child. Therefore accusing it of being inauthentic is like saying that two people with the same last name should be expected to have the same identity. In essence Unilever is like a last name for Axe & Dove, as it is the parent to these brands. Given that there is no expectation that two people from the same family and therefore sharing the same last name should have congruent personalities why should Unilever’s “children” be expected to have congruent personalities?

So getting back to the original questions, I think fundamentally marketers fabricate narratives based on market needs and wants. Their job is to tell the stories that people want to hear and in telling those stories authenticity is important. So it is important for Dove & Axe to be internally consistent by being true to their narratives. However this does not reflect on Unilever because fundamentally I see it as just a corporate entity or a shell. I believe that this distinction between corporate entities and brands will increasingly challenge marketers as they contend with the predominant view of corporations as cohesive individual identities.

This challenge will only grow more complex as industry concentration and market fragmentation exacerbate the difficulty of making this distinction. Industry concentration is increasing and large companies are growing larger in today’s globalized and borderless economy meaning that larger and larger numbers of brands are increasingly gathered under one corporate umbrella. Markets are becoming more fragmented, prompting corporate entities to create more brands, as consumers increasingly demand offerings that speak more specifically to them.

So are marketers liars? No, fundamentally they are storytellers, they tell us stories the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. Is authenticity important? Yes, it is, but only insofar as it pertains to a brand. The corporate entity should always be treated as independent from brand identities otherwise a company risks finding itself in a situation where it could be viewed as inauthentic.

The challenge for the marketers of the future will be to create more compelling, individuated and unique narratives that are able to forge a connection: a connection that goes beyond the corporate entity and creates micro communities around the brands themselves.