Oh no, it's anti-marketing again....... and the riveting, radical, radiant world of the letter R!

Yes, we're back into the reverse anti-marketing alphabet (Z-A) again and the letter R. Happily, we're steaming into calmer waters now, after some pretty difficult letters! Let's be honest, no one one wants to write a blog about anything starting with an X or a Z.

But R has a rich vein of anti-marketing traits. So, let's get stuck in.

The easiest one is REVERSE-PSYCHOLOGY MARKETING which basically does what it says on the can. But it takes a strong nerve and a lot of slick panache to pull this one off. Deliberately telling everyone that your product is terrible is the name of the game here. Some brands, Like Marmite, manage this with considerable aplomb with their ‘you either love or hate us’ campaign. Someone much cleverer than me called this sort of marketing: ‘pleasure derived from pain with large slabs of contradiction and masochism thrown in', which is good enough for me.

ROOTLESSNESS is a technical term for yet another simple idea which you can probably work out yourself. Yes, it's just highlighting the fact that people nowadays have few or no ties to a place or community. We are all members of a transient, constantly moving and changing population. And all caused by the Internet. The anti-marketeer would probably claim that we are all now members of new online neo-tribes which are just new types of global communities( which reflect interests, hobbies, buying habits, political leanings etc.) instead of the traditional geographical communities of the past.

Oh yes, there's another meaning of rootlessness and not linked to the one above at all. It probably should have another name entirely. This one is much more marketing-orientated and refers to campaigns which have absolutely nothing to do with the product being advertised. Hence the rootlessness. It is when marketing teams expect the customer to do all the work in 'understanding'what they are up to. Think Guinness and that commercial shot in black and white with a heaving ocean, white horses, a nonsense poem and lots of drum-beats in the background. And not a mention of a pint of the dark stuff.

RELATIONSHIP MARKETING concentrates on maintaining excellent relations with current customers by offering exemplary service. It is not so concerned with looking for new customers, hoping that word-of-mouth recommendation will naturally increase customer footfall. The problem nowadays is that relationship marketing has had to evolve into something else, something a little less intrusive, the most compelling reason for this is the recent change in the law over customer privacy and data protection. Businesses can no longer bombard clients with their love. And so, it has had to evolve into ENGAGEMENT marketing.

REVERSAL is another postmodernist and slightly weird concept. The simple premise is that the roles of the marketeer and the consumer have changed completely. We are now in a consumer-led society where the consumer has become a kind of ‘brand ambassador’ and product advisor. So, what are we talking about here? In traditional marketing it was Production that led the way, with Consumption as the end of the process. The sale was made and the consumer went home to ‘consume’ what he or she had bought. End of story. In postmodernist marketing the roles have been reversed. Consumption is not the end of the whole thing. It could be argued that this is just the beginning of everything... with the customer then offering feedback, star ratings, completed questionnaires and generally offering assistance to the producer on the next stage of production as well as giving advice to fellow potential customers by way of the Internet.

RETROSPECTION This is how we perceive time nowadays. Everything from the speed of the sale / payment /delivery to the time spent on a site ‘browsing’, ‘channel-hopping’ and even the number of seconds spent watching the average television commercial. It is here because SPEED and TIME are now the critical factors in our buying habits.

And, ironically, to be fast but not-so-good, is infinitely preferable to being slow, but fantastic! Put simply, getting your product to the customer's front door trumps everything. People will pay extra for second-rate goods as long as they can get them quickly. Modern-day consumers never like waiting - they prefer a quick solution, even if it's not as good as the one they would have to wait for. Of course, getting the fantastic product really fast is the Holy Grail, but come on, we all know that that rarely happens. Just sad fact of life of the Internet-driven society we live in.

Then there is NOSTALGIA, which could be seen as another arrow in the retrospection quiver. For example, using a Mini car of the 60s to sell 21st century clothing in a shop window (see the above picture of The White Company's showroom in Bromley, London). Or some kid in a northern town pushing a bike up a steep hill to deliver bread. Or an Audrey Hepburn lookalike eating Galaxy milk chocolate in a vintage car somewhere near Monte Carlo. It is the use of the past to sell the present, because there is nothing quite like the ‘good old days’ to stimulate a tired public into getting its wallet out. This is not really an 'R' I know but I got carried away.

OK... enough of all this malarkey. We have an interesting exercise next with the letter 'Q', which should tax my creative powers yet again.

For more on this sort of stuff.... have a look at this...

https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/adrian-liley/the-anti-marketeers-handbook/paperback/product-1665dwpk.html?page=1&pageSize=4