Why promotion is dead, and marketing is the Next Big Thing

A couple of weeks back on LinkedIn, I posted a link to an article that hailed the advent of the Metaverse as new tech that would completely revolutionise businesses everywhere.

The article was sponsored by a management consultancy urging CEOs to get on board with this brand new disruptive tech before their own company gets disrupted out of business.

My post went viral (c50,000 impressions and counting) – not, I suspect, because readers found the linked article especially insightful – but probably because the world-weary cynicism of my post struck a chord with many people on here fed up with the constant “Next Big Thing!” hype in their LinkedIn feed from people who ought to know better.

I do seem to get quite a few posts in my feed that proclaim that “X is dead!” or “Forget everything you ever knew about Y” or “The world has changed but you just don’t know it yet!”

Given I work in marketing – and so most of the people I follow are marketeers – this constant hype in my feed has rather bothered me.

But it took a really perceptive comment in a message to me from one of my connections – step forward Gerry Mezzina – that crystallised why I felt this discomfort.

Gerry‘s comment?

“There’s a whole lot of promoters out there, not many marketers!”

Marketing – surely – is the identification of buyer need and the alignment of organisational resource to satisfy that need at a profit.

So much of what passes for ‘marketing’ in these kind of shouty “Next Big Thing!” posts is really just ‘promotion’, as Gerry says.

It also explains why – as the virality of my original post might suggest – most of my fellow marketers are fed up with it.

So here’s my own message to the shouty promoters clogging up my feed:

– please, please take time to understand need
– align the resources of your business so that you can satisfy that need at a profit
– then
– and ONLY then
– go to market with a proposition that is relevant to your audience, distinctive from what the competition are saying, and is believably true.

In the meantime, please get off LinkedIn and save the shouty hype for Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.

The true marketers on here can see your BS for what it is.

Thank you.