Marketing managers have now more or less learnt the topical key words – emotional engagement, authenticity, engaging in conversations…
But the doing of marketing is still essentially flawed – because marketing is still treated as a standalone function at the end of a linear service/product development pipeline. Marketing is still treated by many businesses a veneer/façade function, and thus necessarily shallow.
You want to be authentic, genuine, appeal to a tribe, start real conversations? You need to BE those things. You cannot “do” genuine or authentic – that is just BS and fake. Just think personal ads… You cannot make up values, beliefs, ethics as a marketing exercise divorced from the actual value creation process (assuming your business creates actual value that is).
Marketing as it is set up is still siloed and isolated from other parts of a business. There is little synergy. It is like the mouth saying one thing while the hands make something else. Until this is addressed, marketing will increasingly fail to deliver what business 2.0 demands.
