Before, During, and After - The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

Before Advertising, there was word of mouth. Products and services that could solve a problem got talked about and eventually got purchased.

The best vegetable seller at the market had a reputation, and her booth was always crowded.

During Advertising, the combination of increasing prosper-ity, seemingly endless consumer desire, and the power of television and mass media led to a magic formula: If you advertised directly to the consumer (every consumer), sales would go up.

A partnership with the right ad agency and the right banker meant you could drive a company to be almost as big as you could imagine.

After Advertising, we’re almost back where we started. But instead of products succeeding by slow and awkward word of mouth, the power of our new networks allows remark-able ideas to diffuse through segments of the population at rocket speed.

As marketers, we know the old stuff isn’t working. And we know why: because as consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems. 

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

In 1912, Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented sliced bread. What a great idea: a simple machine that could take a loaf of bread and...slice it. The machine was a complete fail-ure. This was the beginning of the advertising age, and that meant that a good product with lousy marketing had very little chance of success.

It wasn’t until about twenty years later – when a new brand called Wonder started marketing sliced bread – that the invention caught on. It was the packaging and the adver-tising (“builds strong bodies twelve ways”) that worked, not the sheer convenience and innovation of pre-slicing bread.

Did You Notice the Revolution?

Over the past twenty years, a quiet revolution has changed the way some people think about marketing.

Tom Peters took the first whack with The Pursuit of Wow, a visionary book that described why the only products with a future were those created by passionate people. Too often, big companies are scared companies, and they work to minimize any variation –including the good stuff that happens when people who care create something special.

Peppers and Rogers, in The One to One Future, took a sim-ple truth–that it’s cheaper to keep an old customer than it is to get a new one – and articulated the entire field of cus-tomer relationship management. They showed that there are only four kinds of people (prospects, customers, loyal customers, and former customers) and that loyal cus-tomers are often happy to spend more money with you.