Volume 162b: The Marketing of Modern Marketing is Mostly Bullshit.
The Marketing of Modern Marketing is Mostly Bullshit.
tl;dr: McKinsey, again.
The title of this piece comes from a LinkedIn post I wrote about five years ago. Borne of frustration, it was based on the observation that so much of the promises of the Adtech/Martech industrial complex, the marketing bros, and the digital transformation gang appeared to land on a four-box matrix with the following axes:
Although little has changed materially, I had mostly forgotten about that post until I read this piece from McKinsey on the six capabilities necessary for modern marketing success.
And what can I say? I know which quadrant I’d put the below in.
If you’re tempted to read it, it’s probably not worth your while. I did, and can save you the trouble for the following reasons:
It mistakes marketing for advertising. The article doesn’t describe marketing capabilities and doesn’t at all reflect the 4Ps. Charitably, it describes the subset of analytical capabilities necessary to run highly personalized and micro-segmented digital ads, which means it represents a subset of the promotional P. I don’t know about you, but that sounds way too narrow to me.
It completely misses creativity, design, production, media, experience, and marketing strategy. I mean maybe all of that lives in “full-funnel marketing” but…dunno, see point 3, below.
It’s riddled with vagaries. One of the rhetorical tricks used by management consultants is the use of vague terms to make themselves seem smarter and you dumber. This piece is riddled with them. Full Funnel Marketing and Customer centricity as capabilities? What does that mean? Where’s the specificity?
It fails to acknowledge that the needs of a large brand and organization often differ from those of small brands and organizations. Not recognizing that the needs of organizations at different stages of their evolution may differ kind of renders the whole thing moot…unless…vague terms alert. Maybe if we keep it vague enough, we can fudge to fit any organization.
Nowhere does it reference anything to do with competition, market dynamics, external forces, or market research of any kind. In other words, they appear to be advocating for a position where research, insight, competitive analysis, etc, are unnecessary capabilities, and flying the plane using only first and third-party behavioral data is just fine. Worse, the article actively poo-poos marketers for over-reliance on “focus groups and qualitative research” instead of stating the glaringly obvious: the smart marketer makes use of both research-based and behavioral-based insights, qualitative and quantitative.
The article is riddled with underlying issues. Its base focus is on efficiency rather than effectiveness, little number thinking rather than Big Number thinking, and it views the micro-segmentation and personalization of advertising as a prime goal at exactly the moment this conceit is under more empirical pressure for being ineffective than ever.
Beyond that, there’s the typical trope of survivor bias, highlighting two anecdotal stories to make their point without providing any meaningful empirical evidence in support of it.
Finally, the one insight in here that I do think is worthwhile somehow gets buried. When I did my MBA many moons ago, I was left with two conclusions. First, an MBA doesn’t make a terrible manager great; it weaponizes them. Second, an MBA isn’t a business degree; it’s a languages degree. Every part of the organization speaks a different language. The language of marketing is different from the language of finance. The language of finance is different from the language of operations and so on. The useful thing this article identifies is that as marketing delivery has become so complex, it’s also become multi-language. My takeaway is that if we’re not willing to simplify marketing delivery, then we’ll need to create pidgin that connects enough of the dots across these different languages to be effective.
What disappoints me the most about this article is that for all the travails of McKinsey, nobody ever accused it of being dumb. And this, my friends, is dumb. It should never have been allowed to ship.
There’s literally no excuse for putting dumb thought pieces into the world when you’re doing billions in revenue, have some of the world’s smartest people on your payroll, and work with the leaders of the world’s biggest and best marketing organizations.
It’s a travesty. Marketing is already in bad enough shape without yet another poor take from McKinsey. (Does anyone remember the hubris of “performance branding,” which advocated for treating brand marketing exactly like a performance marketing campaign?)
I wrote last week about my disappointment in Prof Byron Sharp presenting what I see as an incremental addition to the work of Kotler as if it’s a fundamental disruption of Kotlerian orthodoxy. But this is much worse.
Which neatly brings me to my final point. There’s a long and storied history of thought leadership in B2B settings, especially among firms that advise others, as McKinsey does. Until fairly recently, these were typically well-resourced and influential groups, often led by people with exceptional journalistic and editorial credentials. The goal was to present deep intellectual competence and understanding of issues that people inside the client organization would be drawn to work with and learn from.
Then, the shift to digital happened, and thought leadership was cut up, re-engineered, and re-branded as content marketing.
And then everything went to shit.
Why? Because thought leadership at its best is about quality. It’s low-volume, high-quality thinking. It’s well-resourced and excellently researched and provides a window into the intellectual leadership of the organization. While advisory brands have always used it as a sales tool, its value wasn’t primarily judged on the basis of how many specific individual leads it drove. It was more of a branding vehicle, where attribution was always more fuzzy math than actual math. And there’s the rub.
The promise of digitally enabled B2B content marketing was never to improve on thought leadership, build brand preference, reinforce premium pricing, or present you as the smartest people dealing with the toughest issues. Nope. B2B content marketing has always overtly represented the enshittification of thought leadership. It’s about chucking chum into the water and then bottom-feeding via a content factory mentality. It’s always been about quantity over quality, about clicks and downloads, and email addresses and sending crappy leads to your sales team from the fake email addresses people invariably use to gain access to the content you create, assuming they bother accessing it at all.
As a result, we’re in the midst of a period of ever-declining click-through rates as quality slides into irrelevance, and people learn to route around stuff that’s pretty much useless to them. What’s chilling is that rather than view declining click-through rates as a signal that something is fundamentally wrong, a common response is to spin the wheel faster. And now, with AI-driven design and writing, I can guarantee the hamster wheel of the utterly ignored masquerading as thought leadership is accelerating toward infinity.
So, yeah. If McKinsey really wanted to do something interesting in the marketing space, maybe it should start closer to home and fix its own approach to thought leadership. Ditch the bottom-feeding content marketing mentality and these dumb takes. Instead, bring back the intellectual heft it was once known for.
No matter how big an advisor like McKinsey might become, if it keeps presenting obviously dumb takes often enough and for long enough, then eventually, the premium glitz of being a luxury brand for the CEO will tarnish.
I’ll leave you with this thought. LVMH is the world’s largest owner of luxury consumer brands. It intrinsically understands that in order to maintain luxury pricing and demand, you must invest in creating and maintaining worlds of unique artifice that reflect pinnacles of quality in design, creativity, production, materials, distinctiveness, and more. Then, you use these elements to build emotional desire by treating your brands as shared social signals of individual success that you deliberately constrain access to by limiting supply.
Right now, McKinsey is doing the exact opposite: Acting like a bottom feeder while attempting to maintain its position as a luxury good for the CEO.
And if that doesn’t say everything you need to know about why McKinsey is becoming increasingly less credible as a voice in the marketing conversation, I don’t know what will.
I can’t help but feel that it’s living off past glories, and with its recent reputational travails combined with terrible takes like this…well, it’s hard to see that lasting forever.