How marketing is being disrupted

I wrote the first version of this article a few years ago, when my children were still young and digital marketing, social media, automation and AI were things we were all figuring out.

Fast forward to today, and now they're grown adults with their own careers, consuming content in ways that could never have been predicted back then. In a world where TikTok trends come and go within a week, and AI-generated content is practically mainstream, it’s time to revisit why your marketing might still suck—and more importantly, how you can fix it.

Let’s face it: Marketing has always been about change

What worked yesterday won’t necessarily work today. The strategies that might have once catapulted your brand into the limelight are now buried under a sea of data gathering, algorithms, customer preferences and new platforms.

When I wrote this article the first time, I was mainly talking about the basics—knowing your audience, getting the message right and maintaining consistency. These fundamentals still hold, but the game has gotten more complex.

Now, marketing is about data, personalisation, speed and adaptability. The campaigns you run today can’t afford to ignore this. If your marketing strategy looks like it did five years ago, it’s already outdated.

So, what went wrong?

1. You’re not personalising enough

Back then, targeting your audience meant choosing between a few demographic slices—age, gender, location. Now, if you’re not creating hyper-personalized content that feels tailored to each individual, you're falling behind. Customers expect you to understand their needs and preferences before they do. If you're blasting the same message to everyone, you're marketing like it's 2010.

2. Your tech is stuck in the past

The rise of AI and machine learning means that automation can now do the heavy lifting for you. When my kids were younger, we had tools to schedule posts or analyse basic metrics. Today, AI can analyse customer behavior, predict trends and generate targeted content. If you're still manually tracking engagement or not integrating tech to streamline processes, you're wasting valuable time and resources.

3. You’re too slow to adapt

Marketing today moves at lightning speed. While you’re crafting the perfect message or refining that three-month strategy, trends are coming and going. Social media, for instance, is a place where brands can rise and fall in a matter of days. You need to be quick to pivot, test new approaches, and capitalize on what's happening now.

4. You’re ignoring community

Years ago, marketing was a one-way street: you spoke, hopefully customers listened. Now, it’s a conversation. Building a loyal community around your brand is more important than ever. My kids don’t just follow brands—they engage with them, they share their thoughts and they want their opinions to matter. Your marketing strategy should be focused on fostering that connection.

How to Fix It

The bad news? If your marketing still sucks, there’s no quick fix. The good news? The tools and strategies to improve it are better than ever. Here’s where to start:

1. Embrace Automation and AI

There’s no excuse not to know your audience inside and out. Use analytics, customer behaviour data, and social listening tools to craft personalised messages that resonate. Your customer data is a goldmine—tap into it.

2. Embrace Automation and AI

You don’t need to do everything manually anymore. Use AI-driven tools to create smarter email campaigns, analyze market trends, and optimize your marketing efforts. Focus on what AI can’t do: connect authentically with your audience and create meaningful narratives.

3. Be Agile

Stop planning six months ahead as if nothing will change. Build flexibility into your marketing strategy so you can respond to shifts in trends, technology, or customer behavior. It’s not about planning for perfection; it’s about being ready to adapt.

4. Engage, Don’t Just Broadcast

Think beyond just pushing content. Build communities where your audience can engage with each other and your brand. Whether through social media, customer forums, or events, engagement is your most valuable currency.

Final Thoughts

My kids are adults now, living in a world where technology is intertwined with their daily lives in ways I couldn’t have predicted. And just like them, your marketing needs to grow up too. What worked back then isn’t going to cut it today. The good news? With the right tools and mindset, it’s never too late to fix your marketing.

At this point I must confess I have without shame or apology borrowed the title for this article from the book Your Marketing Sucks by Mark Stevens. I liked the title because it’s ballsy and immediately identifies a need and, for many franchise owners and other business people, a sore point. That’s why many of the people who purchased the book from Amazon.com and then posted a review on the site said the title was the reason they bought the book.

Let’s face it, it got your attention, otherwise you wouldn’t have read this far, right?

But the dusty old Marketing 101 textbook tells us that for marketing to be effective it needs to go further than that. It’s not enough to simply identify a sore point. You’ve got to make an offer that promises to solve the problem. Then your product or service, plus the way you deliver and price that product or service, must all live up to the promise – or you’re never going to get the opportunity to cross-sell and upsell and keep that customer for life, marketing's ultimate aim.

And that’s where Your Marketing Sucks falls down.

In fact, the title may not suck but the book does, according to the majority of the Amazon reviewers, who gave it just one star out of five. They complained that the book never delivered on the offer implicit in the title that it would show them why their marketing sucks and what to do about it. Although most agreed with the book’s main premise – that when you don’t start with a plan or strategy and don’t have a way to track results, you may as well be throwing your money away – they were clearly disappointed to find that the book isn’t a ‘how to’ guide containing lots of great ideas they could use and a step-by-step guide to creating the ideal marketing system.

The problem that Mark Stevens and every other marketing book author faces is that marketing is changing so fast that it just isn’t possible to provide ‘how to’ guides that won’t go out of date in five minutes. More and more modern marketing doesn’t even look like marketing.

Let me give you an example. You may have been wondering why the two photos above and the one below don’t seem to have any relevance to the text of this article.

The reason is that they were part of a marketing campaign that was cleverly designed not to look like a marketing campaign. In fact, it was designed to look like social media posts from a young French woman called Louise Delage. Her life seemed glamorous and beautiful, and in a very short time she had tens of thousands of followers on Instagram. But a little over a month after her debut, the truth was revealed.

There was no Louise Delage. The woman was an actor.

You’ll notice that in every one of the ‘glamour’ posts, she has a glass in her hand. That’s because this was actually a campaign about alcohol addiction, conceived by a Paris advertising agency for an organisation called Addict Aide. At 2017’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, it was among the most-awarded campaigns.

The Man in the Hathaway Shirt advertising campaign

Using actors and fictional characters in advertising isn’t new, of course. In this ad for Hathaway Shirts from 1951, legendary adman David Ogilvy came up with the idea on a whim of putting an eye-patch on the otherwise perfectly-sighted model. It worked. It added what Ogilvy called ‘story appeal’. “It made Hathaway instantly famous,” he later said. “Perhaps, more to the point, it made me instantly famous.”

Does your marketing have story appeal? Does it tell your story in a way that has meaning for your potential customers? If not, that could be the reason your marketing sucks.

The difference between the Hathaway Shirts campaign and the ‘Like My Addiction’ campaign is, of course, that the former appeared in paid advertising whereas the latter was posted ‘for free’ on Instagram. But was it really free? The marketing agency invested heavily in bots and influencers to build Louise Delage’s followers rapidly. And Instagram was the ideal medium for their target market of under-25s.

But what if your target market is not so internet-savvy?

Trouble is, the internet and social media have become more addictive to marketers than alcohol. That's caused many who are normally quite smart to have become so swept up by the whole Web thing that they’ve abandoned reason completely and chosen to ditch their traditional marketing for the new media.

Big mistake. Immediately, their marketing has started to suck.

That’s because although the internet and the electronic world seem ubiquitous, they’re not. One out of every two people is still watching good old-fashioned telly. No Netflix for us, thank you very much. More than 1.6 million New Zealanders are still turning to traditional paper newspapers every day and more than 1 million watch ONE News or 3 News every night. These people may also be rubbing two sticks together to cook their dinner, but they are still the majority.

Online marketing has yet to replace traditional media

Having said that, it is another big mistake to dismiss the Web as a fad and simply continue to market your business as you always have. That sucks because the internet still offers some outstanding opportunities to reach your target market more cost effectively than tradition media. In fact, pay-per-click marketing services such as Google Adwords and Facebook are a marketer’s dream because you only pay for results and you can monitor the success of every campaign in real time, using analytics to enhance your campaign and build on your success.

If your marketing sucks – and it probably does, simply because it is virtually impossible for even the most savvy marketer to keep up with the ever-changing smorgasbord of marketing developments and opportunities out there – we invite you to contact us for a free Initial Consultation on how we can help you.

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marketing strategy, planning, creative and programmes - including web marketing, social media marketing and mobile marketing
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