Trend: Accelerated Culture

Jay Pattisall, Brand Strategist at Modernista!, has posted a great analysis/summary of marketing in accelerated culture on ihaveanidea.com. Similar to ideas posed at the Future of Marketing Summit, Pattisall addresses the increasing ineffectiveness of traditional marketing/advertising in today's cultural landscape. He cites culture's shift from unity to plurality as a function of our fragmented media and increasingly fragmented industries, and discusses the paradox between our fast-paced networked worlds v. our "slowpaced" physical environments.

I recommend the article - but as for excerpts, below is what he calls the "Marketing Conundrum" and how he proposes we need to evolve:

"The implication for marketing is clear. Traditional marketing cannot keep up with accelerated culture because marketing has always followed culture. Advertising and marketing have been labeled The Mirror Makers as their goal is to reflect the audience. To that end, the traditional marketing approach researches consumer trends, conducts surveys, focus groups to uncover an insight about the target. It then exploits the insight, creates a strategy, and executes the strategy into creative work. All the troubled brands mentioned earlier follow this approach, or some form of it. Given accelerated culture, how can we expect the hierarchy of effects/ awareness, interest, desire, trial marketing model, developed after WWII for a three-network mass broadcast system to still be relevant? Given the typical 18 to 20 week strategy-to-creative schedule how can traditional marketing keep pace with accelerated culture?

The answer is it cannot. In a world where the wrong perception stays posted on Wikipedia for 138 days, where the rush for information results in the wrong information, where rumors close international stock exchanges, marketing as we have practiced it, cannot make an impact in enough time. In the future, marketing can no longer follow culture. It must lead culture."