Marketing is now a ‘Whole Sort of General Mish Mash’. And what that means to brands and marketers
by Simon Mathews - 2 comments
Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
My guess is that about a third of you get the reference to the ‘Whole Sort of General Mish Mash’ and the other two thirds have already stopped reading or think I’ve gone off on a tangent too far this time. But, bear with me…
The ‘Whole Sort of General Mish Mash’, or WSOGMM for short, is a concept from Mostly Harmless the fifth book in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.
Adams’ basic idea was that the universe is a just a ‘Whole Sort of General Mish Mash’ and each of our own realities, each universe and each higher dimension is just a ‘slice’ though the WSOGMM.
To me, this sounds a lot like modern marketing and brand communications. Digital has broken down the boundaries of classic marketing disciplines and tactics creating a WSOGMM of marketing ‘stuff’. For example, a Facebook page for a brand. Is that advertising? Well it does contain brand messages and images that are sometimes created by an ad agency, yet there is no media buy. And is a blog post designed to target a specific search keyword and hence drive leads a Direct Marketing tactic?
Taking the WSOGMM analogy further we can look at any marketing campaign as just cutting a relevant slice through the tools, techniques, properties and assets is our marketing WSOGMM.
What does this mean for modern marketers and communications professionals, besides the need to read more Douglas Adams? Well, a couple of critical rules of managing the marketing WSOGMM do emerge:
- It starts with strategy. As there are no silos or protected tactics in the marketing WSOGMM, campaigns need to start with one of two questions. What are we wanting to achieve with the campaign? Or what do our customers want from us? (or both) By starting with strategy then allocating funds to the relevant slice of the marketing WSOGMM there is a much higher chance of success than starting with a statement along the lines of “we need an ad campaign to do…” Sometimes the 30s TV commercial may be the right solution, sometimes it will be a user-generated brand curated twitter campaign, and other times a fully integrated slice of all the techniques in the marketing WSOGMM.
- Organization and budget flexibility. If there are no silos in the marketing WSOGMM then there needs to be more flexibility in a company’s organizational and budgetary approach. Having groups only focused around a discipline, such as the “advertising team”, and a fixed annual budget to match, is conceptually at odds to the idea of the marketing WSOGMM. Of course, operating with no teams and 100% flexible budgets is very difficult to pull off, and may not be worth it. But a broad marketing team focused around brand goals, customer engagement and integrated campaigns is both achievable and desirable.
So, have I coined a new phrase, (apologies to Douglas Adams)? The Marketing Whole Sort of General Mish Mash [MWSOGMM]? Or maybe that should be the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash of Marketing [WSOGMMM] ?