Reinventing Marketing

My last cartoon before the holidays was about playing it safe. The other extreme is complete reinvention.

There’s truth in Bill Gates’ classic 1996 observation:

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

Organizations can get get stuck in a rut and resist change. And yet we simultaneously have a tendency to overstate change, which can lead to jumping on the bandwagons of shiny new things like NFT collections, which peaked this time last year.

Navigating change is a long-term constant in marketing.

I recently stumbled across a McKinsey article titled “The Changing Face of Marketing.” What amazed me is that it was written in 1966, nearly six decades ago. The article was about everything changing, and yet passages read as if they could have been written this week:

“Change is the dominant fact of life in every business today. And the ability to master and exploit change has become one of the most sought-after management skills. This is particularly true in marketing, where the very tempo of change is constantly quickening…

“Today’s chief executive faces a baffling dilemma. Change gets costlier every day; yet not changing can be costlier still. And even while adapting to change, a company’s marketing effort must reflect an internal constancy of purpose and an external consistency of image.”

Here’s to another year of more things changing and more things staying the same.

And here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years: