Old is New & New is Old

There are new ways to deliver marketing messages, mostly made possible by evolving technology… but can we get one thing clear? There is NO “NEW MARKETING”! Enough with the seminars, articles and manifestos declaring the end of “marketing as we’ve ever know it”. One such seminar declared; “It’s not just the “four P’s” of marketing anymore. It’s not just “brand” anymore. Over the last ten years, marketing has been inundated with new ideas...blah, blah, blah.” AAARRRGHH!

Some people will point to cell and wireless technologies that soon will deliver personal messages specific to a store as you drive or walk by. In a smaller time a storekeep would stand in his door and greet you by name as you strolled by, “We’ve just received the latest shipment of hats from Sear Roebuck if you care to stop by later.”

Some will point at “one-to-one” marketing as evidence for “new marketing”. Marketers in a smaller time knew that EVERYTHING was one-to-one. In a smaller time marketing had to be about truth, trust, and surviving in a closed loop (the village).



I can tell you what I do believe is changing, and it’s not marketing. It’s the village. The village is getting small again (thanks once more to technology). People are shaping new villages linked by some common thread without geographic boundaries. And these new villages have all of the characteristics of their older, geographically confined cousins. Circles of familiarity; First-hand knowledge of the other people in their village, and a distrust of people from “the outside”.

I say again, there is no “new marketing” to learn. Marketing, on a timeline of “what works when” is simply repeating itself. Throw open your history books… it’s all there.
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