Slow Marketing

The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.

-Professor Guttorm Fløistad

Fred Wilson’s recent post on  slow capital in a recent post caught my attention and held it as I contemplated the analogues to marketing.  In working with clients on strategies for connecting their business goals and aspirations to the customer who shares those same goals and aspirations, some of the things that Fred is seeing by investing slow, I’m seeing in marketing slow.

Marketing is particularly at risk of falling prey to the cult of speed. Let’s  adopt this technology, let’s change this message, let’s hit the quarterly numbers with a massive ad spend. This tactical ADD is compounded by the relentless pressure our clients feel to ensure that their agencies are delivering ROI value to their businesses.  The post-recession consumer is exhibiting values and views that do not align with fast marketing, so let’s dig into some ideas of slow marketing and see if we have the start of some answers for post-recession marketers. This is a start and you’re contribution to expanding this thought are welcome and encouraged:

1. Return to the beginning - Return to your roots and remind yourself of what the original problem was that started you down the path of creating this product or service. American’s are entrepreneurs in mind if not always in action, the story of how a product is created and the problem it set out to solve matters and resonates. Tell that story.
2. Feedback is everything - Success is a matter of pattern recognition. If your business is selling to a customer, seeing their participation behavior is essential to building and supporting your relationship with that consumer.  You cannot internalize your marketing, in fact you must externalize everything. Embed feedback in your product, your marketing and your management organization so that you have the richest stream of customer data. While it may seem like we’re in a fast moving constantly changing world, if you can see the deeper, slower moving underlying trends and position against those, you’re probabilities of long term success are much greater.
3. Value and Values - In pursuit of the material at core, consumers see through pretense to the performance. Things have to work. Emotion attracts, rationality sells.  Call it ‘defending your life’, but purchases need reasons or you’re not seen as a smart consumer.
4. Declasse Consumption - The appearance of spending recklessly is passé.  Pretense is out, prudence is in: it’s stylish to exercise restraint and even to bargain in order to appear as a smart consumer.
5. Flea market capitalism- A capitalism based on personality, uniqueness, provenance and storytelling, where the product is connected to the producer/seller and the transaction forms a relationship. Increasingly this manifests in a local manner, where artisanal products are valued for being local and steeped in narrative, building value into their meaning. Moving from consumer to customer is at the heart of Flea Market Capitalism.

What would you add? Can we add slow marketing to the slow movement pantheon?

Tagged as: Capitalism, Consumer, declasse consumption, marketing, Marketing and Advertising, slow movement