As traditional advertising budgets continue to decline, ad agencies have turned to digital media vehicles like search engine, web banner advertising, email and mobile marketing—but all eyes are on the prize, the mother of all em
erging opportunities: social media.
The problem is: applying the same interruptive advertising approach used in traditional “push” media, to a user-controlled “pull” media environment, is inherently incongruent and may well not work. If so, a new revenue model must be established, and that’s the code everyone is trying to break.
In what would appear to be the last vestige of the dot-com era, where investors funded technology-driven ventures without an established business model, the darlings of social media are under increased pressure in a contacted economy to shift gears from network building to profitability. For most this means retrofitting a revenue model that is appropriate for and acceptable to a pull marketplace. And consumer tolerance to advertising is growing thin.
While other auto manufacturers are retrenching, repositioning or re-inventing, one venerable brand is holding its ground and simply restyling. BMW of the future looks to be a lot like BMW of the past. It will be interesting to see how much share remains for the high-end brands in a contracted market where consumers have learned some hard lessons about excess and fiscal sensibility.
Consumer behavior has changed and will not be the same, even as the economy recovers—something 
business will have to adapt to as it vies for a piece of the smaller pie. It’s analogous to the consumer correction that occurred in the post-depression generation, which brought a renewed respect for the value of a dollar, for saving money, paying off the car and driving it into the ground. An aging Boomer generation, most of which has been living well over an extended period of prosperity with easy credit to buy things we really couldn’t afford — like big homes and a new car every three years — is now faced with the realities of post-recession contraction, a reduced labor force, depleted 401k plans, devalued real estate holdings and too much debt.
This contraction in spending power within the massive U.S. Boomer population will probably continue over the next 20 years or so as the bulge moves closer to retirement, with more conservative fiscal priorities: less debt and more catch-up savings, fewer extravagancies. Not only will the market be smaller for the BMWs of the world, but product life-cycles will be extended as owners keep their cars longer, with more buyers looking for used car value.
What goes around comes around I guess. You start segmenting the market and it comes back to segment you. In this case it’s a profile: the Marketing Personality. And it’s not pretty. In fact, it’s just ahead of Neocrophilous Personality on the chart, which is basically a self-destructive death wish.
This is according to Erich Fromm, the famed psychoanalyst who built on and enhanced Sigmund Freud’s defining work on personality types, adding one of his own — the marketing orientation.
How I got there was attempting to better understand the underpinnings of customer decision-making and purchase behavior — by going beyond transactional, demographic and life style orientation, to the deeper, darker regions of personality — which get to the true emotional drivers of who we are and why we buy the things we buy. So I went back to the source.
Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail, which I found to be a very good read, has published a follow-up book titled FREE: The Future of a Radical Price. A meaty subject, I would think, so I go online and read some mixed reviews. From what I can ascertain, it’s an investigation of how companies need to deal with the new market reality that digital content can no longer be controlled and metered in a world of open access, and how business needs to evolve new strategies and revenue models around the concept of free, which he views as a tremendous opportunity.
This would appear to be an elaboration or extension of Stewart Brand’s declaration that “Information wants to be free.”
“In the digital realm,” Anderson states, “you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.”
The economic gravity he refers to is a pull market where distribution has given way to access.
