Marketing Week’s Room 101: What will you banish?
In the first episode of a new series, three marketing heavyweights make their case for the marketing buzzwords, theories and jargon that must be banned from marketing – which do you want to see consigned to Marketing Week’s Room 101?
Three industry leaders have stepped up to share their biggest marketing bugbears for the first episode of Marketing Week’s Room 101 series.
Peter Weinberg, head of development at LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, Grace Kite, managing director of Magic Numbers and David Wheldon, the former CMO of RBS, all share their contenders. And now it’s over to you to vote for which one gets banished.
Weinberg’s two nominations are personalisation, which he describes as the “worst idea in the history of the marketing industry”, and the mis-use of awareness as a metric. “People think of awareness in a very generic, one-dimensional way”, he says, which is unhelpful.
Meanwhile Kite wants to see the practice of bidding on other brand names as a search term come to an end. As well as being “immoral” she says it is responsible for a “massive waste of advertising money”.
Her second nomination is the marketing law of double jeopardy, which suggests smaller brands, or those with lower market share, have fewer buyers and those buyers are less loyal, which is “demoralising” for small businesses. The shorthand for double jeopardy is “it sucks to be small”, she says, which is bad for the economy.
Last up to the table is Wheldon, who says he simply wants to see the end of “marketing bullshit”. “When you write documents why don’t you reread them and see if you would understand them if you take your jargon hat off?”
His second nomination is for brand purpose, which leads many poor brand managers down a “rabbit hole of ridiculousness”. “The concept of brand purpose is not helping us marketers be more purposeful and more respectful of the world we live in,” he says.
Watch the show to hear the rationale behind each nomination and then make your vote below. Marketing Week will reveal the winners (or should that be losers) soon.
The next episode of Marketing Week’s Room 101 will be happening live at the Festival of Marketing later this month. Festival of Marketing: Transform takes place on 23 to 25 March at The QEII Centre in London and online. There are a number of ticket options. Visit the website for more details and to book your place.
