THE REALITY OF MODERN MARKETING

From the marketer's point of view, the goal of communicating effectively with consumers is even more difficult to achieve because of the trivial differences that exist among the brands in most product categories. There are very few products or services available to consumers that are truly differentiated from and superior to the products or services with which they compete (Weilbacher, 1993).

If, as the work of Andrew Ehrenberg and his colleagues demonstrates (Barnard and Ehrenberg, 1997; Ehrenberg, Barnard, Kennedy, and Bloom, 2002), consumers form "repertoires" of acceptable brands and divide their purchases among them more or less randomly, what is there to motivate consumers to seek, pay attention to, and store more information about a particular brand? If the consumer as consumer cannot or does not, in practice, differentiate much among brands, why should he continuously seek new information about them?

Whatever a consumer does know about a brand, drawn from whatever combination of sources, will, in ordinary circumstances, be enough to sustain the brand's status quo in his perceptual system. In this formulation, a major objective of advertising and sponsored marketing communications, generally, may well be simply to reinforce and reiterate the fact that the brand exists, is eminently acceptable for use, and is widely available to consumers.

The contemporary understanding of how the brain functions and how it permits consumers to process information about brands thus, in the final analysis, leads to a totally new perspective about the role of advertising and marketing communications. The challenge, for the marketer, is to find a way to sabotage the normal workings of the brain--to make the brand seem ever more acceptable and more preferred than it can possibly be as a result of normal brain processing of advertising and marketing communications.

Advertising, or any other discrete sponsored marketing communication, is unlikely to accomplish this alone, at least as these activities are now conceived and practiced. Advertising and marketing communications generally operate now almost exclusively at the tactical day-to-day level. Most contemporary advertising and marketing communications are not conceived or developed in a way that is likely to effect much change in the existing picture of the brand that most consumers have--a picture of the brand with a collection of characteristics not unlike those of its competitors.

As advertising and marketing communications are now practiced, they tend to perpetuate the static--one is tempted to say stagnant--mental brand image of the brand that has been accumulated over time in the consumer's mind.

To overcome this static mental brand image, the marketer must conceptualize the brand as a brand, not merely as a product or service that he wants to sell more of. The question here is not what the brand is at a transactional level, but what it can be made to seem to be in the mind of the consumer. Thus, for example, Saturn--at least as it was originally conceived and presented to the public--was considerably more than a relatively low-priced car made in the United States-more, that is, than just another Neon or Focus or Cavalier. It was not presented as another essentially generic commodity within a competitive set; rather it was "a different kind of company, a different kind of car" with all that these words came to mean to consumers.

Much of the current rhetoric within the advertising agency community about brands and branding is simply a new set of words about the idea that advertising works through conscious consumer connections and discrete, advertising-caused, consumer responses. The crucial challenge for advertising, and all sponsored marketing communications about brands, is what consumers can be made to learn about the brand that transcends its transactional qualities. The question is what can the consumer be made to believe about the brand that differentiates it and makes it seemingly acceptable in spite of the fact that it has no performance or other literal quality that makes it all that much different from its competitors.

Advertising, specifically, and sponsored marketing communications, generally, must somehow upset whatever the consumer now perceives about the brand and transform that perception into some sort of feeling that the brand is among those that are totally acceptable within the product category. Advertising, specifically, and sponsored marketing communications, generally, must be thought of as devices to increase brand acceptability. Only by making a brand seem more acceptable is it likely ever to join the brands that are already perceived as acceptable or continue its current membership within that group.

Advertising and sponsored marketing communications must be created in the context of whatever consumers now know and think about the brand. Advertising and marketing communications must be used to modify the existing perception of the brand, making it always more compatible with everything that the consumer expects and wishes to find in brands in the product category within which it competes.

How can advertising, specifically, and sponsored marketing communications, generally, be used, first, to interrupt the normal processes of the consumer's mind as it exists with the reality of brands and, second, to make a particular brand become more acceptable within these mental processes?

The challenge for marketing communications is to upset the way consumers think about the marketer's brand by bringing new and totally unexpected information and images about it to the consumer that will force his self-conscious processes to rethink, to coin a phrase, what the brand is and why it is important to the individual.

Sponsored marketing communication, including advertising, is not a stimulus in the behaviorist sense, and it does not directly cause consumer responses.

Sponsored marketing communications, including advertising, have the potential to reorganize the way in which the consumer perceives and appreciates the brand. But the current practice of marketing communications and advertising simply cannot, has not, and will not routinely cause such necessary mental reorganization.