Ed Cotton: Corporations Need A Reason For Being

In Adweek July 18th- Warren Berger wrote an interesting piece about the potential mid-life crisis of the ad biz.

“There are lots of tough questions companies must confront in dealing with a consumer who’s more engaged, more informed and more concerned with social issues than ever before. Among those questions: What does the company stand for? What does it believe? How does it make its products and treat its employees? Is it being straight with us in its ads? All of these points are part of the larger conversation people are now having about brands.”

This isn’t a crisis inflicting advertising, it comes from somewhere, it’s a corporate identity crisis- could corporations have lost track of their reason for being?

You sell stuff, we know that, but it’s not enough.

What’s your reason for being?

What do you want to do when you get to work in the morning?

Does your brand have a cause?

To the bean counters and the analysts on Wall Street, these things seemingly have nothing to do with the revenue and margin numbers they care about, but they do. The hard sell has gotten so pervasive and old, there’s a load of white noise out there with people “selling”, but doing nothing more. We are over-supplied with stuff and the noise that surrounds the perpetual consumer cycle is tiring people. They’ve found ways to cancel the noise and to find alternative sources of information. People want and need more and there’s so much more brands and their corporations could do.

It seems like we’ve confused marketing with purpose, that marketing is something that helped us out when we didn’t really have a clue about who we wanted to be and what we wanted our businesses to stand for.

(Continue reading here.)

Ed Cotton is the Director of Strategy at BSSP, and is curious about all things relating to brands, marketing and culture. Read more at influx insights

Image by Veer.

Veer has recently relaunched its site, Veer.com, with a simplified, easy to use interface allowing for enhanced and simplified image search.  The site, which is a go-to source for creative and affordable stock photography, illustrations, fonts and merchandise, helps people add style to business, marketing, and personal design projects.