Guerrilla thinking

The more we watch ads and web campaigns running around, the more convinced we are that marketing people and agency creatives have gone nuts.

It must be the crisis, but brands have lately become frantic and tend to oversell their goods pushing agencies to say whatever needed to sell.
On the other hand, agencies have completely lost a sense of ethics. Their high payrolls and desperate struggle to survive got them bent over. They sometimes try to say “no” but then they soon go back “yessing” and doing what “the client” (to be pronounced with a serious and dramatic voice) is asking for.

Lies, lies, lies or unsaid things. Everywhere. Now more than ever.
Smoke in the eyes of customers. 
When they don’t succeed in having them bored beyond belief, they try to trick them.

After all it’s not their fault. This is the way communication has always played in the past.
In an ever-growing market you could get people to believe they needed a useless thing to sell more. You actually should it. 
When the economic time is running fast and money is all over (such as in the widely celebrated fabulous 80s) the market has the power to get your desire in its hands and make it grow.

And the more you pay and buy, the more you want. Because you can and you earn a lot of money.

But I am sorry to tell you my dearest reader that these times are over.
It’s happening right now. It’s like an awakening.

People are getting more and more aware of things and personal needs and wills.

Deceiving won’t work anymore. And this is not just a crisis of advertising economy. It’s the crisis of an entire civilization, of an economic model, of a way of life.
In many ways we could say that the beast of the market has started to eat itself.
For many reasons.

Here they are.

1) PEOPLE WANT VALUE FOR MANY

no more frills guys.
With less money in our pockets, we tend to calculate our small to big investments and try to understand the real benefit a purchase can give to our life.
What once was a necessity is not anymore.
In a recent survey of more than 2,800 college students and young professionals in 14 countries, Cisco found that more than half said they could not live without the internet. They rather dispense with their car than an Internet connection, whenever forced to choose between the two.
We want that every single dime we put in a thing is worth the effort it takes to earn it.
And being worth does NOT mean that I have a cool thing to show to my friends, but that I have an item that’s adding significant value to my daily life.
The promise you make in an ad is the most important thing nowadays. It’s always been. But if in the past your creatives could afford not to care about it and play on cool ads to get people to buy, they can’t do it now.

If you don’t say WHY I should buy and give me a clear view of the benefit I could have once I do, you are failing. Now more than ever.
Sure, you have to do it in the most engaging and entertaining way, but you have to do it.
 

2) BRANDS ARE NAKED

That’s it. If 30 years ago you could say whatever you wanted to sell and basically sleep good at night, now the nightmare of a blog, forum or video is going to haunt your dreams.
It is time to be honest. To say what your product really is.
And if you think the way it is is not enough, then it is time to evolve, to change the product.

Yes. The taboo of untouchable crap products we have to lie for is gone.
No matter how much you get your agency to lie to the audience, they will find out the truth. And they will expose it to the all world.

Trust you good Guerrilla thinkers, you are naked. And you can’t pretend anymore to have a six pack under your label. If you want to say that you will have to work out.

3) LIFE IS MORE AND MORE OPEN SOURCE

Jeremy Rifkin prediction was right.
We are heading to a world where people will not possess things but rather use them.
Bike and car sharing services are a clear example of this.
I don’t need to own a means of transport, I can pay for that when I need one.
And the same can be sad for technology, houses, and daily things in general.
As the time goes by and this crisis affect all of us, we are starting to believe that we don’t really need what we have, things.
We need what things can bring to us, we need to use them and therefore we don’t have to buy. We can share.

Sharing is spreading from the web to the real world.
People are starting to share many different things and have also begun to share time.
This goes even beyond Rifkin idea. In its model we would pay to rent our lives and access what we would need. And that was the prediction of a very popular web evolution that goes under the name of cloud computing.
But what’s happening instead is that in real life we are also starting an open source life model, where we share pieces of our lives and get some from the others to build our experience.

In the experience we share with others there are also our thoughts and ideas about brands and products. What we think of a product contributes to generate a universal shared vision of itself.
That’s why we say that understanding that your brand is naked is so important.
Crap will be crap. And no advertising idea will fix it.
Because the journey people share is much more powerful than the lies you can tell them. 

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FINAL CONSIDERATIONS: 

Of course there are many more things to say about this.
But these 3 key points will help you (we hope) to refocus your expectations and vision of the future of your brand.
Don’t keep on deceiving. Understand that the awareness and reputation of a brand are becoming more and more universal and that disappointing one may these days mean disappointing ANYone. Do it and you will not fail.