The Four Horsemen

Conquest of Tradition, or the white horse, is evidenced by the rejection of truisms that built a few generations’ worth of businesses and brands. The most notable of these is the accepted wisdom [sic] that consumers will buy only if you don’t sell to them. Applied to the what of marketing purpose, instead of the how, our latest observations about consumers has yielded any number of highly creative and celebrated social media campaigns that 1) cost much less than traditional ones, and 2) produce far less tangible results, like sales. 

Yet we pursue this track as if engaging people via the immediately worthless mechanisms of chuckles or "friend" clicks is the same thing as forging real relationships, or prompting purchases. Hasn’t marketing always struggled to make the connection between brand and business closer, if not more measurably meaningful? Such tradition is being sacrificed for new metrics that draw on the new flourishes of analogy and metaphor.

Conversation as War, or the red horse, reveals itself in the faces of the angry people screaming about healthcare at town hall meetings, or the flamer comments that follow one after another in online chat rooms. Our era of more conversation seems to yield less agreement: a single customer experience can leverage a community response (United Breaks Guitars, or Grumpy Hertz Employee are examples), thereby transforming brand relationships into conflicts of "us vs. them."

Thank goodness the average attention span of consumers has been shortened to that of a buzzing gnat.

Famine of Judgment, which is the black horse, is illustrated by GM’s cancellation of plans for a new vehicle after a week’s worth of negative tweets. It’s "Vuick" model was a Saturn retread that probably deserved to disappear, but is the new mediascape actually supposed to take the place of actual business leadership? The premise that the Crowd is somehow more insightful, correct, and unbiased is shockingly flawed, unless you believe that "best" is synonymous with the easiest, most blunt, and lowest-common-denominator conclusions.

Brands automate or otherwise restrict customer service, and prefer to monitor the mediascape for complaints or opportunities…often outsourcing the very substance of the conversation to third-parties, or to outright strangers (however inspired they might be). 

Finally, the Death of Certainty is the pale horse, which we see in the loss of trust and faith in any public institution. We know too much to believe what governments tell us, and we have access to our very own rich, immersive communities (mostly online) to reinforce what we think we’re really being told. Every subject, from the macrocosmic to the mundane, has multiple viewpoints and interpretations; no statement exists without a context that qualifies it. It’s no different in marketing communications, which finds itself trying to communicate with consumers who are not longer paying any attention, as well as hoping to tell them things they won’t likely believe anyway.

OK, so maybe it isn’t the Apocalypse, necessarily. But there’s more than a modicum of truth in the revelation, isn’t there?