Joseph Jaffe: How Not to Suck (At Marketing)
Joseph Jaffe, author of Built to Suck and Flip the Funnel, discusses the dwindling influence of corporations, why branding AND performance marketing together may be their only salvation, and the future of marketing and brand building.
“People believe it's either/or. My answer is it’s 'and' -- and has always been 'and.’ I don't know why people picked a lane.”
By Joe Jaffe
With COVID-19 creating the reality of frozen budgets or postponed projects as well as the obliteration of in-person meetings and conferences, Joseph Jaffe did what his current book advises of corporations: he pivoted. His personal and professional reinvention was tied to a focus on what he knew best: creating content and helping people, in part via his streaming show, CoronaTV, now 125 episodes in and counting.
It is a show born without a brief or plan, but of a global pandemic, explained Jaffe. He’d been quarantining after a visit to South Africa while his wife actually was recovering from COVID-19. So, he thought, “’let me do a story.’ It's a little irreverent, almost like poking fun at the bear. It's a show about hope, positivity, optimism. And if there's time leftover a little bit of marketing.”
His hope and optimism for the corporation, however, wanes a little, per his current book, Built to Suck. And, just as Jaffe himself learned to pivot, shares candid perspectives in this Q&A with The Continuum about the need for marketing to evolve.
Where do you stand on the brand vs demand debate?
I'm a brand guy, and a brand guy who believes that if you do this right then surely good things will follow, and that will almost always result in sales. I like to talk about long-term sales vs short-term sales. How can we reinvent that instead of saying brand and demand? Why don't we just create a new thing that actually talks about long-term brand efficacy, playing the long game.
Why is there still a debate?
I think the challenge is that people believe it's either/or. My answer is “it’s 'and'” -- and has always been 'and’. I don't know why people picked a lane, like it’s a fork in the road. At a minimum it’s more like parallel paths. But here’s a better analogy: think DNA string that keeps on intersecting and coming together. If you entwine two pieces of rope like those DNA strands, then pull those two pieces, eventually it ends up being just a straight line. And that's the goal. The two co-exist and converge. I just don't think we've done that yet.
Maybe we need a new word or compound phrase that encapsulates this. How about “brand demand” or “branded demand?”
So, is it about proving effectiveness?
I remember Lee Clow saying that the problem is not advertising, it's bad advertising. But, with respect, he's wrong. The problem is that he’s saying good advertising is going to somehow prevail and survive, but it has been completely smothered and lost and in the quicksand of all advertising (both good and bad).
He was half right. Of course, the problem is bad advertising. He was just talking about message, but he didn't count medium. And the medium is that the good advertising was like the tree that falls in the forest, and no one there to see it.
The essence of the challenge is that we end with advertising blindness. Advertising becomes nothing more than Muzak. So, no amount of metrics in the world is going to make up for that. We have a scenario where the actual business model of advertising is broken. First fix that effectiveness before dissecting the various channels and sorting the wheat from the chaff.
What is driving the death of the corporation, as you warn of in your book?
When you’re a slave to Wall Street and short-term thinking then everything kind of cascades around that. And that is why we are unable to move beyond this and move forward. We have this arrogance and hubris that corporations will just be around forever. No one lives forever. No man, no civilization, no empire, and certainly no corporation or brand. No one thinks that Proctor & Gamble or General Motors will be gone in a hundred years, but the writing's on the wall. If you want to survive and thrive, you've got to have a longer-term vision and plan. And do I think marketing plays a role.
“The essence of the challenge is advertising blindness. Advertising becomes nothing more than Muzak. no amount of metrics in the world is going to make up for that. First fix that effectiveness before dissecting the various channels and sorting the wheat from the chaff.”
What role does marketing play in that equation?
Peter Drucker said, “the business enterprise has two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are 'costs'.” How ironic is it, then, that marketing is looked at as a necessary evil, or even an unnecessary evil, as a cost center, as an expense. We're being judged, oftentimes unfairly, especially the newer forms of media or mediums or technology. But ultimately, it's all with a short-term focus. When we think about running a business with a short-term obsessive focus when ultimately the real stake is long-term survival...when we make that connection, that leap between short-term survivors and long-term drive, that's when the brand versus demand challenge will finally be solved.
What comes next?
Size was initially the growth enabler, but now it has become a growth inhibitor almost to the point where it’s become an albatross around the neck of the corporation, because they just moved too slow. If a company can figure out how to move quickly and be a risk-taking client, and not be so siloed or so political, and maintain the pace and the speed necessary to keep up with technology and change, then, yeah, absolutely. But entire industries like retail are being completely turned inside out, mainly because of Amazon. …We need a new business model and until we figure that out, we are just going to continue to decline.
December 1, 2020
