Volume 49: I guess we’re all just humaning now.

1. Mondelez arrives late to the party, vows to get drunkest.

tl;dr: They’re not marketing any more, they’re humaning.

Mondelez International is basically ground zero for nonsensical drivel. This is a company that sells snack foods that taste good but are objectively bad for you, filled as they are with sugar, fat, salt, and various other disease-inducing ingredients. Which would be fine if it wasn’t for their stated purpose of “doing what’s right,” which translates into a corporate tagline of “snacking made right,” which on their website drops you straight into an Alice in Wonderland-like alternate universe where up is down and loading up on Oreo cookies and Cadbury chocolate is somehow both excellent for the environment and a major contributor to your own personal wellbeing.

I find it utterly exasperating that major corporations like Mondelez and Mars and BAT who all make things we crave but are spectacularly bad for us can’t just be honest about it. Instead, they perpetrate a bizarrely fatuous and obvious act where they pretend that what they’re doing is the literal opposite of what they’re really doing. At least when McDonald’s informed us that we were “lovin’ it” they weren’t pretending it was health food.

Anyway, I guess that when the foundations you’re building from are themselves formed from 99.9% pure bullshit, there are literally zero constraints on any of the other nonsensical things you might choose to cook up. Which brings me neatly to Mondelez’s new and shiny re-branding of marketing called humaning. Now, I see you out there giggling, but just in case you’re wondering what it actually means here it is in their own words:

“Humaning is a unique, consumer-centric approach to marketing that creates real, human connections with purpose, moving Mondelēz International beyond cautious, data-driven tactics, and uncovering what unites us all. We are no longer marketing to consumers, but creating connections with humans.”

Oh God, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. Or maybe I was just laughing so hard I accidentally swallowed my tongue. I just can’t tell anymore. Anyway, I can tell you right now that the last thing pretty much anyone wants is a human connection with a candy bar or a bag of cookies.

So why, you might wonder, are we being be assaulted by this crap? Well, the reasons are actually quite prosaic. With the quarantine’s and the lockdowns and the pandemic we’re suffering through, there’s been a snack boom and requisite battle for market-share going on. Turns out that when we’re anxious and stuck at home all day, there’s nothing we like more than ploughing through bag after bag of snacks and chocolate. And now Mondelez wants to make sure they’re getting their share of the action so the upside doesn’t all go to Pepsico instead.

So, let me translate this for you. Here’s what Mondelez are really saying: There’s a snack boom party going on and…oops, we missed it. So like a drunk arriving late to the party, we’re getting loaded on this Jager bomb of a statement in order to catch up.

Yeah, nope, whatever.

2. Big brands are winners or brand switchers, or something, which is it?

tl;dr: McKinsey gets themselves all in muddle. Again.

One of the things we all pretty much knew was happening, but has finally got some data attached, is that the biggest winners in the pandemic have been some of the worlds largest CPG companies (except, it would seem, Mondelez). Brands that typically see year on year growth or decline in the low single digits have, this year, seen swings as great as 30-40%. Some of the biggest and smartest, like P&G and Unilever, saw the impact early and decided to double down on marketing spend in a bid to establish impenetrable market share leads.

However, at the same time, because demand across certain classes of product have spiked beyond the capacity of the manufacturers to supply, consumers have also exhibited an inordinate degree of switching behavior on things like toilet paper or hand sanitizer or bread yeast. (Although I’m pretty sure that none of us even knew what bread yeast was before the pandemic).

Anyway. It’s this switching behavior that McKinsey, those peddlers of false hope, decided to pick up on in this “surprise and delight your customers” report (Thank you Adam). In it, they make the case that when people are switching brands, the answer is to invest in building a “paid loyalty scheme.” What’s that you might ask? Oh, ho McKinsey replies, it’s when consumers pay the company for the privilege of being a part of their loyalty scheme. And if you’re thinking WTF right about now, I’m right there with you.

But let’s forget about the obvious consumer cynicism for a second and take this argument at face value instead. If people are switching because your product is out of stock everywhere, then no amount of “paid loyalty” is going to work. Second, things like Amazon Prime (which they reference) aren’t really about loyalty at all, but about increasing buyer frequency among those who were primarily put off by postage costs. And third, as Prof Sharp has pointed out over and over again, incremental investments made to increase the frequency of purchase by non-loyal, infrequent buyers of your product is a far more value-creating strategy than anything you can achieve merely by encouraging greater loyalty.

So, why are McKinsey going here? Oh, it’s very simple and has nothing at all to do with the success of a prospective client. It’s because there’s a lot more consulting dollars to be made researching the economics and pricing and features of a paid loyalty scheme and all of it’s varied permutations than there is in telling a client to spend more on advertising so they can win a market-share war.

3. Please leave politics out of the conversation about who can market to whom.

tl;dr: Well that was fast.

(First, I must caveat that the irony of my opening statement is not at all lost on me.)

I find the smug superiority of marketing opinion-writers quite stunning in their utter lack of self-reflection. Perhaps it’s just a field that embraces self involved narcissism, I don’t know. What I do know is that for peak smug superiority look no further than Marketing Week in the UK. Case in point, this steaming turd of patronizing claptrap that appeared way faster after the election than any of us deserved. What it boils down to is a statement of the following: “Ha, ha, liberal marketers with your nonsensical ideas. Half the country voted for Trump, so let’s see you be the voice of the consumer now.” Which is not only spectacular in the sweeping ignorance of its generality, but also insidiously dangerous in its claim.

The underlying conceit appears to be predicated on the idea that marketers who are more politically liberal than a portion of their customer base cannot effectively market to that customer because they refuse to accept that the customer holds differing values from their own. To understand just how ridiculous this is, it’s the equivalent of saying a marketer who isn’t a multi-millionaire cannot market to people who are, or that women marketers cannot market to men, or that people with college degrees cannot market to those without, and so on. A basic pillar of marketing is the attempt to understand the behaviors and motivations of people who are largely unlike yourself, so to say that someone’s personal politics fundamentally blinds them to a core competence of their chosen field is a huge, sweeping and dangerously inaccurate conclusion to come to.

Worse, the lack of mention of whether a politically conservative marketer can effectively market to a liberal consumer is not at all lost on me. In its absence, one can only assume the author believes this not to be a problem at all. Which, by the way, also means the author is doing exactly what he’s busy excoriating others for, which makes the whole exercise more than a little hypocritical.

Anyway, back to the point. If it is even remotely true that politically liberal marketers pursue strategies that are incongruent with more conservative consumers then surely this competitive disadvantage shows up in the form of depressed earnings from their employers, a general and ongoing public outcry from the those who are being mis-marketed to, and, I would assume, waves of firings among an incompetently left-leaning marketing class. But, guess what, nothing even close to that appears to be happening. In fact, let’s take it further. Personal political affiliation, either liberal or conservative, has almost zero bearing on whether someone makes a good marketer or not. I guarantee that marketers are equally incompetent at both ends of the political spectrum and that customers quite literally don’t care. Because whether you’re pro Biden or pro Trump is largely irrelevant when you’re buying toothpaste or washing-up powder or insurance or a new phone, or…frankly, most things to be honest.

Could marketers do a better job of understanding their customers? For sure, always. And should marketing overall look more representative of society as a whole? Again, yes. And every marketer I’ve ever met would agree with both of these things. But that’s not what this article is saying at all. The insidious thing here is an underlying thesis that left-leaning personal politics and values somehow poisons a persons ability to be an effective marketer, which in our current environment is quite frankly, dangerous.

So, please leave politics out of marketing commentary. Whether someone leans right or leans left, it should literally have no bearing at all on their ability to understand the customer and market to them. And to suggest otherwise is simply ridiculous.