Are Western marketeers arrogant?

Two weeks ago I published a column on the Dutch Marketing weblog Molblog.  I was writing on the fact that we, marketing and communciation advisors, can be pretty arrogant. At least, that´s a conclusion you can draw from what I see. I have been looking around quite a bit in the corporate world and especially with the bigger companies I see a lot of employees who accept what they know for the truth and don´t try to think originally. They can tell exactly what tone of voice to choose, what channel to push the product through or what medium to pick without taking one step back and look at their products or markets from a green perspective.

The result of our current behavior is that there is a lot of crap going around. And because everybody´s copying from eachother, there´s even more crap going around. And it´s not just big companies who do it, it´s also the smaller ones and agencies are very good at it as well. Evidence of the last is that a fresh brilliant idea of an agency´s creative director is a trend in the whole industry within a few weeks or months. I´ve been seeing that process now for years already.

I think the reason is that apart from forgetting to be original, too many professionals have never seen a company´s client themselves! At the least, that´s pretty shocking for people who are trained to reach target groups. Unilever sets the example here. Exactly fitting in what I´m preaching.

In Asia I saw that the distance between marketeers and clients are much smaller. Although the Asians have some of the highest buildings in the world, the marketeers of the East don´t live in ivory towers, at least not as high as in the West.

I think the best solution is in the middle: in the West marketeers should become a bit more of a salesman, in the East they might wanna think a bit more strategically. But hey, in those booming markets (6.5% growth in China during a worldwide crisis), you don´t have to plan five years ahead. You´re selling anyway!

In the West; please let´s try to be original. Don´t copy an idea of a competitor or from another market, but really think what fits the values and goals of your product or your company. It will make the world a bit more colourful and your job a lot more inspiring!