Good post from Alan Mitchell at Marketing magazine:
“To reinvent marketing successfully, I believe we have to jettison marketing’s Persuasion Paradigm: the belief that marketing is ‘effective’ when it changes consumers’ attitudes and behaviours, and that this is what good marketing does.
Persuasion isn’t marketing’s only paradigm. The other paradigm is alignment – the belief that successful companies and brands align themselves to doing what their customers want them to do.
With very few exceptions, these two belief systems are contradictory and mutually exclusive. If one is right, the other one can’t be. If you are doing more persuading, you are also doing less aligning. And vice versa.
But today, elements of both are alive and well in marketers’ minds, battling it out for supremacy. This constant warfare isn’t helpful.”