Marketing Won't Save You. Your Consumers Will.

Commissioned by WARC for their 2024 Future of Strategy Report

You get a brief and, unfortunately, the product and brand are set up to fail. There’s nothing you can do about it. Good luck.

Entertainment studios are testy when audiences voice disappointment in a film before its second trailer even gets released. Car manufacturers are distraught when their primary segment has no interest in their next model. And financial service organizations are perplexed when consumers become antagonistic to anything they have to say.

These scenarios are marketing’s everyday dilemmas.

We’re post-copy, jingles, and TV spots. Now, we discuss “cultural strategy,” the practice of effectively resonating within the larger zeitgeist ecosystem. But while this approach is more “PR” than traditional advertising, being proficient in emerging social shifts does not make selling an unwanted film, car or credit card any more successful.

No amount of trend research will help if findings are not integrated much earlier in the strategy process.

What so many organizations get wrong about marketing today is that they treat foresight, cultural intelligence and social listening as downstream efforts.

Too often, every single day, we attempt to map already finalized products to a mismatched zeitgeist.

Instead, such cultural intelligence should be leading R&D, innovation and executive strategy.

We’re spending millions too late.

We’ve reversed the figure and the ground: We’re spending more time, energy and money on the attempted harmonization of an offering and culture, than we are ensuring whatever’s being produced is even desired and produced effectively via cultural insight.