By Simon Billing
Marketing should be the easiest gig going. Most people have wallets stuffed full of money, all of which they are going to – all of which they are bound and determined to spend (borne out by the pitiful savings rates in most developed economies). All we have to do is convince them to spend some of it with us.
I was looking at Dave Trott’s agency website. I love their idea of predatory thinking, the strategic underpinning of an idea being expressed as the “predatory thought”. It’s a refreshingly honest way of looking at business that channels everyone directly to the real job at hand. Preying on someone else’s share of wallet is what we do. Prouk (former Chairwallah & CD of Scali McCabe Sloves, Toronto) used to say he loved attending bi-monthly Nielsen market share audits because: “they’re the body count.”
Years ago, Ries & Trout put it slightly differently when they said that in aptly positioning our brand, by definition, we reposition the competition.
The idea of predatory behaviour doesn’t sit well with most Canadians. The Protestant work ethic, which despite our vaunted multiculturalism still underscores much of life on the tundra, means we imbue the work we do with great seriousness and moral purpose. Taking a cue from our national critter the beaver, diligence is a virtue, but the vulpine instinct is not part of the national character.
Marketing has no function if not to take a sale away from someone else. No matter how unique your offering, Mr. & Mrs. Punter will spend the money with someone else if not with you. If you’re a charity, the job is to deprive some other charity of a potential donation, or a store of a purchase that would otherwise have been made with that money; if you’re Crest it’s to steal share of pearly whites from Colgate or a store brand; if you’re the Army then you have to lure potential recruits away from the police or industry or the BNP.
Wal-Mart is a voracious hunter of other stores’ customers: drugstore customers, supermarket customers, clothing store customers. Everything they do is designed to bag a sale that would otherwise have gone somewhere else.
Marketing Magazine (in Canada) is polling readers to determine the best TV spot of the Winter Olympic schmaltz fest. I don’t know how they determined the list and, having assiduously avoided watching the country engage in its conjoined pastimes of self-aggrandisement and self-flagellation, I haven’t seen what else was on offer.
As dull, predictable and decidedly non-carnivorous a collection of corporate cuddliness it would be difficult to find. And yet this probably represents the largest marketing investment any of these companies have made in a decade. Millions of Canadians glued to the telly, the audience happily captive once again, for an entire fortnight, and all they have to say is “we’re nice folks, just like you”.
Go Canada.
*Credit: Gary Prouk, former Chairman and Creative Director: Scali, McCabe, Sloves (Canada) Inc.
Via Grumpy Brit
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Apple's, "I'm a Mac" campaign illustrates "predatory thinking" to it's maximum. A knife sheathed in velvet.
Posted via email from Flatacre
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