The Modern Era of Marketing
Featuring Kirstie Leadley (ZEDRA) and Anna Fenten (Searcys)
Anthony Giddens, the famous British sociologist, described modernity as:
“a shorthand term for modern society […] it is associated with (1) a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation, by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy. Largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society—more technically, a complex of institutions—which, unlike any preceding culture, lives in the future, rather than the past.”
The emphasis in bold is mine, for it is these bolded excerpts which, for me, summarise what goes into this oncoming era of Modern Marketing.
Put plainly, we have a set of brands open to a new future, a set of platforms more complex than ever before, and a set of consumers whose attention forms a democratic vote based on allocation of time.
As we shift into this modern era, we can chart that vastly more dynamic world in which brands are handing the keys to the kingdom to creators, letting communities of consumers co-define your brand and making a wide spread of lo-fi, authentic content.
To buttress this thesis, I enlisted the help of two leading Marketers working in totally disparate fields: Anna Fenten of Searcys (one of the world’s leading hospitality brands) and Kirstie Leadley of ZEDRA (a top financial services group in the UK).
It was telling to see just how open they both were to Modern Marketing, in spite of their different categories, and different company histories.
For Anna, she’s operating at a company “which is over 175 years old, which always stays true to itself in the market, which always stuck to its values, yet my role is now all about experimentation and innovation.” Similarly, for Kirstie, at a business about a decade old, “the hope going forward is to find a couple of really innovative and unique channels that Zedra is leveraging, beyond any of the competition.”
When probing them on what, above all else, feels different now, Anna put it bluntly: “the way we consume information has changed."
Every brand, in order to grow, needs to get someone to consume information (be it via an OOH ad, packaging, word of mouth, etc) before they consume the product itself.
The problem now is that attention is more fractured than ever before. In a given market, you used to have 1-3 big newspapers, 1-3 big TV channels, 1-3 big radio stations, and little else. Cover those and you could cover the majority of the population's attention.
Per this chart on Meltwater, on social media alone (forget Substack, YouTube, Netflix, podcasts and so on) there has been persistent growth in the number of sources of information vying for attention.
What this complexity entails is fragmentation. Just on TikTok, according to Pew Research Center, only 5% of accounts are followed by 5 or more users. Niche-based, fandom-oriented popularity is far more common. Seeking and finding information is fragmenting away from big highways, and towards the sidewalks of the internet.
As search moves into “other” spaces, if you're still playing the Google-only game... You’re in existential trouble. The cost of inaction? Your competitors figuring out where the eyeballs and leads are, and getting them locked in before you do.
But it’s not easy. As Kirstie put it: “despite all the change, Lead Generation is still a big part of our Marketing department’s strategy, and we are focused on figuring out how we deliver volume, but still prove lead quality through conversion.”
So what to do? For me, and for Kirstie and Anna, there appear to be three golden rules to win in the Modern Era of Marketing:
1. Create structures that let you take more shots on goal:
Most brands are still too geared around big loud “bang” launch moments. You need to raise the quantity and keep the quality high. The good news is high-quality content is less expensive than ever before. $5m Super Bowl Ads get less reach than some TikToks made for $500. Everything comes down to taste.
As Anna put it so well: “You ideas don't cost either — you have them or you don't. The execution of ideas used to cost a lot, but I think that this is where we have opportunity.”
2. Know your 70:20:10:
It’s great if you have something that is working well today (your 70), but I promise you it’s going to get saturated and not work as well in 12-18 months time. It always happens (email, Instagram ads, podcast ads, etc etc) You have to get out in front and find the next reliable channel (20), as well as what’s right on the frontier (10).
For Kirstie, the next reliable channel in B2B was clear: “What I'd love to see is a focus on user generated content within the B2B space. We need our clients, consumers, customers, to be the central characters in our story. They’re our superstars and we want to make them the hero in our brand stories. We should just be in the background of their success but with a really clear connection to how we’ve helped them achieve their goals. The same for our people.”
3. Get the best experts on your team:
Think you can win on new channels with proper platform native know-how? You’d be the first to do so!
From Anna’s perspective, it’s all about arming her full time employees with all the resources they need: “Of course my job as a team leader is to make sure that everyone has sufficient clarity in as far as strategy and plans are concerned. But primarily my role is to create the toolbox for them so they can sort of pick and choose the support they need when they need it.”