Honest Marketing? I call bullshit.
Business Week had a hilariously depressing story (subscription) about Safeway's marketing strategy, which is basically, don't roll out some multi-million dollar campaign until you can be what you say you are.
"To escape, Safeway had to pull off a challenging feat. While continuing to offer popular food brands at low prices, it had to add higher-quality fare and transform its sterile aisles into a more stylish environment. Most important, consumers had to believe the change was for real, not just window-dressing. That's a tall order for an 80-year-old retailer whose customers associate it with fluorescent lighting and Oreos. So the company used what management gurus call authentic marketing: the art of telling consumers a story they want to believe, then delivering the products and experience that make the story real."
That's right people, honest marketing across all touchpoints has been anointed with a new moniker from the management guru's over at Safeway, "Authentic Marketing."
I kind of chuckled through the article because it just seems so ridiculous. This is news? Don't make your advertising bullshit, and expect your dumbass customers to be blindly led down the primrose path?
The thing is, THIS IS NEWS! It's just another indication of the fact that advertising DOESN'T WORK in a black hole. No matter how many dollars you have to spend, there is no long term benefit in throwing advertising dollars at a problem that has nothing to do with advertising.
It's possible for bad advertising to fuck up a great product, but it's not possible for great advertising to save crap. Trust me. Box up some crap, and try to sell it. If you're not as chic as this guy, then it won't sell.
It also says a lot about our industry when we actually have to segment a part of our work as authentic, like it's some new, emerging skill set. Clearly, we have some work to do in transforming our image, and that starts with all of us designating everything we do under the heading of "Authentic Marketing."