Mark Ritson has a few words to say about brands

As marketers age they either disappear from view or become cynical or both.

In Mark Ritson's case he is very much in view and providing a good dose of reality therapy for the many marketers who inhabit Idealism Land.

This has nothing to do about older consumers but I expect most of them would agree with the sentiment.

Here is what he had to say in today's Marketing Week.

Brands aren’t loved by anyone either, other than the marketers who manage them. Most of these marketers live a virtual reality existence of brand love and corporate purpose. These marketers have forgotten that the fact they spend their lives working on a brand does not make up for the brief seconds of time it takes up in the consumer’s life.
Most brands are totally ignored.

A few have a tiny dollop of salience, which proves enough to win market share. Still fewer have genuine meaning for customers. But this vision of consumers establishing relationships and love for brands is over-wrought marketing horseshit – the wet dreams of marketers that never actually hang out in the supermarket aisle, or listen in to call centre staff, or stand in the rain while consumers trundle past their hot new visual merchandising in that shiny big window that no-one notices.

Great stuff. Dick Stroud