Rohit Bhargava on Reinventing Marketing

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A fantastic presentation by Rohit on reinventing marketing. I have been a long term fan of his work for many years and I found this recent Tedx talk particularly inspiring. In this talk, he states why we are all in the business of marketing. In everyday life we try to influence others to do something, whether its trying to convince a spouse over what dinner choices to make. Or, trying to convince our kids to eat their vegetables.  However, over recent years marketing has experienced a bit of a bad reputation because “it will bend you to its will”.

Rohit continues to state that marketing suffers from what he calls “The Marketing Mirage”. Namely products have traditionally been marketed on the basis of:

• Features – People buy things because of features. Or, the belief that it solves a particular need.
• Promotions - If I give you something for free or discount it, you will buy it or more of it.
• Demographics - If I know my target audience, I can just purchase media to target my segment better and succeed.

Such models worked particularly well during the 1960s and 1970s, when consumers were “mass media consumers”.  However, consumers have changed and many marketing teams have evolved and become more complex (teams are spread throughout the world, some work together others work in silos). The consumer of today is different, they have full control, it’s become “a one button economy”. All the consumer has to do is publish his or her thoughts online, by a touch of a button and share them with the world quickly easily and cheaply than ever before.

For the first time, we have a huge shift where "virtual trust" now exists. In essence, I will trust the opinion of someone I don’t know, who no one in my network knows and I have no way of verifying whether they are real or not, or credible or not. But I will still trust them. If ten people all say that a digital camera is not good on Amazon I will believe that. Even if i don’t know who those ten people actually are. 

Rohit, ends the talk with a great quote:

When it comes to marketing and when it comes to reinventing marketing, it’s not about retelling the features and benefits and having something that somebody can connect to. What it’s about is having a story that you can tell and that someone else can take, make their own and retell.