Cambridge Business Association
Welcome to the Creative Age
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Welcome to the Creative Age

Bananas, Business and the Death of Marketing

Mark Earls
Wiley, 2002
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Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • For Beginners
  • Engaging

Recommendation

Just when you thought you had this marketing thing down, Mark Earls says it won’t do you any good now. Marketing is out of sync with today’s consumer-centric world of empowered customers and excess supply. In witty prose, Earls contends that creativity is more than catchy words, and he has plenty to say about the brand-as-experience phenomenon and about freeing yourself from convention. His sensible premise comes across as simplistic and naïve. Saying that ideas are the key to success is a bit like saying that love conquers all - a noble sentiment, but vague and not really new. However, this doesn’t pretend to be a how-to book; it’s an idea book, and you interpret the ideas. An ad veteran, Earls provides ample examples and expert quotes on attitudes and behaviors. And if it isn’t news that the market changes constantly, getAbstract.com notes, it isn’t fully understood either. If you want to understand, welcome to Earls’ world.

Summary

The New Life-Blood of Business

Marketing and its practices have pervaded corporate thinking for the past five decades, becoming a fixture in business plans. Evidence of marketing’s creative manifestations appears everywhere - in commercial messages, in packaging and in virtually every interaction between consumer and producer. While society has changed drastically over the past half of the last century, marketing principles have stagnated. Changes in culture and the business environment have rendered marketing theories obsolete. Marketing has lost its effectiveness and its stature: it’s now considered a perfunctory function carried out by the so-called creative group.

Marketing will continue to be ineffective and to speak only to itself unless the business world accepts that new tactics are needed to respond to new challenges and circumstances. Business must replace traditional thinking with a new approach. The old rules no longer apply, and the Marketing Age must give way to the Creative Age. Like its predecessor, the Creative Age offers a framework on which to base a new philosophy of business. But in this new age, ideas are the motivating principle from which meaningful...

About the Author

Mark Earls is executive group planning director at Ogilvy London, the U.K.’s largest communications group. He worked at St. Luke’s and other London ad agencies. Earls edited the 1999 APG Creative Planning Awards case studies. He has been vice chair of the U.K. Account Planning Group and sat on the DTI Foresight Panel. Andrew Jaffe, chair of the U.S. Clio Awards, described Earls as "one of the London Advertising scene’s foremost contrarians."

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