By Doug Stephens<\/p>\n

Imagine a world without marketing.\u00a0 No really\u2026 imagine a world where no one tries to sell you anything.\u00a0 Not because they don\u2019t want <\/em>to but because attempting to do so would be a fruitless waste of time and money. \u00a0A world where there is just one trusted voice capable of penetrating your consciousness. It\u2019s the voice of your digital assistant and that voice alone guides your every shopping experience and decision.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

It may sound implausible but this future may not be as far off as you think. \u00a0In fact, there are a number of things happening right now that are indicative of a future where marketing (at least as we\u2019ve known it) could become largely ineffective.<\/p>\n

Over the last century in particular, advertisements, pitches, jingles, packaging, rebates, guarantees, celebrity endorsements, all worked to sway consumer perception and behavior.\u00a0 Much of this influence was based on sensory, non-rational or emotional inputs that the consumer, often unknowingly, allowed to work on them, creating desire and ultimately purchase-intent for a given brand or product.\u00a0 The effectiveness of marketing was largely a consequence of the consumer\u2019s inability to factually distinguish between one brand and another because they either lacked the time or the stamina to sift through the data.\u00a0 So, in the absence of any overt performance differences between the alternatives, consumers were willing to put faith in whatever data a marketer put in front of them \u2013 a healthy percentage of which was of questionable validity.\u00a0 But what if that all changed?<\/p>\n

What if all that marketing window-dressing got stripped away.\u00a0 What if the only considerations between one brand and another were facts and hard metrics about product and service performance, price and genuine reputation?\u00a0 In other words, what if all the marketing bullshit was removed from the equation and every business was evaluated purely on how good they really<\/em> were?\u00a0 If all of a sudden the difference between two sandwich shops became solely about how good their sandwiches actually are relative to their price and how many positive experiences they\u2019ve created for customers in their stores as evidenced by honest and measurable ratings – not how funny their TV commercial is or how memorable their radio jingle has become but purely based on an amalgam of factors that equate to a hard-ranking of overall performance.\u00a0 In other words, what if we returned to a world where businesses succeeded because they were excellent, not because they could buy more advertising than anyone else or secure a more creative agency.\u00a0 And what if these supremely rational supplier evaluations were being brought to consumers in a\u00a0serendipitous\u00a0way as they went through their day – not for further analysis but merely for a go-ahead to buy.<\/p>\n

The signs of such a future are beginning to show themselves.\u00a0 Projects like GoogleNow<\/a><\/strong> give us a glimpse of a future where apps begin to talk and share with one another on a common communication platform to bring us just in time information based on where we are and what we\u2019re doing.\u00a0 Facebook Gifts is a slice of what\u2019s to come when we truly begin to integrate our respective social graphs into our consumer lives to inform purchase decisions.\u00a0 And fledgling projects like Kimera<\/a><\/strong> strong artificial intelligence, position us at the cusp of being able to rely on our mobile devices as digital valet\/butler\/concierge, to guide us through the best choices to meet our shopping needs at any given instant.<\/p>\n

These algorithmic, Hadoop sifting assistants will be unmoved by marketing spin, smoke and mirrors pricing games or superfluous retailer claims.\u00a0 They won\u2019t care how many ad words you\u2019ve bought or how you\u2019ve optimized your website.\u00a0 They will stick unemotionally to what is factual and measurable.\u00a0 They will promote brands, offers and retailers that best meet the needs of their users based on fact not fluff or fictitious claims.<\/p>\n

I believe the marketing era is coming to a close. \u00a0Furthermore, I think we all feel that in the pit of our stomachs. \u00a0 And the thing keeping more than a few CEO’s up at night is that success in business is going to be increasingly about real performance \u2013 doing what you say you do and doing it excellently well;\u00a0 standing out so distinctly from competitors on every level that you become the default choice\u00a0 – the mathematical certainty.<\/p>\n

The question for all businesses \u2013 regardless of what they sell is this… \u00a0could you survive in a world without marketing<\/em>?\u00a0 Does your business have the chops to withstand the scrutiny of a cloud-based algorithm that can sum up its true<\/strong> performance an instant? \u00a0Are you still reliant on buying attention or does your outstanding performance earn it every day? \u00a0In other words, how good are you… really?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Look for my book, The Retail Revival<\/strong>, in stores February 2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Doug Stephens Imagine a world without marketing.\u00a0 No really\u2026 imagine a world where no one tries to sell you anything.\u00a0 Not because they don\u2019t want [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1],"tags":[241,242,243,24,118,237],"class_list":["post-1791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","category-uncategorized","tag-big-data","tag-googlenow","tag-hadoop","tag-retail","tag-retail-prophet","tag-retail-revival"],"yoast_head":"\n