The one-sentence summary
Brands are the new traditions, increasingly playing the role that tradition used to play by giving people ideas to live by.
WHAT THE BOOK SAYS
- There are twelve rules of New Marketing:
- Get up close and personal: become intimate rather than public and formal
- Tap basic human needs: there are 15 fundamental human drives*
- Author innovation: brand identities should be fluid, not fixed
- Mythologise the new: don’t just reflect the status quo – create possibilities
- Create tangible differences in the experience: sound, smell, touch, taste
- Cultivate authenticity: as opposed to false ‘sincerity’ (see Affluenza)
- Work through consensus: forget targeting, encircle and involve audiences
- Open up to participation: customers should be able to influence the brand
- Build communities of interest: don’t classify them, let them belong
- Use strategic creativity: look at why? how? where?, not standard media
- Stake a claim to fame: do something memorable, you can’t buy fame
- Follow a vision and be true to your values: set the goal and pursue it
- New Marketing is more creative; it treats brands as living ideas that can transform people; it is entrepreneurial, more humanist and less scientific; it favours constant change over conservatism; it is part of a new consumer culture
*They are sex, hunger, physicality, avoiding distress, curiosity, honour, order, vengeance, social contact, family, prestige, power, citizenship, independence, and social acceptance.
WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT
- It is an easy read, well laid out with hundreds of examples
- There are lots of case studies if you need markets to compare: IKEA, Tango, Pizza Express, French Connection, British Telecom, Egg and more
WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH
- The book was written in 1999 so some of the ideas have moved on somewhat