The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

An art 100 years ago --- more and more a science today?

In the 1930s, artists like Alexis Kow produced wonderful art pieces to support advertising for industrial brands such as Panhard, Hotchkiss and Salmson in the automobile sector --- Left,  a photo of an original gouache by A.Kow that I bought at an auction in 1981.

Yet, at that time, marketing was aiming at becoming a science helping production and manufacturing to adapt to distribution and to customer demand and motivations. But businessmen quickly understood that forecasting is very difficult, especially when it concerns the future.

So, for most of the twentieth century, marketing became almost synonymous with advertising, pushing mass manufactured products’ features & benefits down isolated communications channels. Marketing involved intuition, creativity, chutzpah, and other qualitative factors. Even consumer research was more subjective than scientific, aiming at making advertisers feel good about their bloated marketing spending.

Today, the pendulum is swinging back to the scientific side. Marketing has become:

• Customer-centric v product-centric
• Mass customisation v mass production
• Value propositions v features & benefits
• Total customer experience
• Two-away interactive v one-way push
• One-to-one targeting v haphazard broadcasting

With internet-related techniques such as placed ads and search engine optimisation marketing is transformed into a scientific discipline enabling the precise calculation of the ROI at very detailed levels (e.g. impact of changing search terms). Marketing is becoming more maths than art, more accountability than chutzpah.

But we will still enjoy a nice-looking leaflet, an enticing sonic logo and a really funny TV ad, won’t we?