Marketing lessons from bare boobs and 'The Spear'

Only a week ago complaints from shoppers at the upmarket Hyde Park Centre in Johannesburg resulted in a hasty cover-up of a mural depicting bare-breasted women.

Earlier, as we already know, the Zuma 'Spear' painting caused a massive public outcry.

And every day there are stories in the media about consumers being offended by language or sexual insinuation by radio talk show hosts and of course, there is the perennial wave of complaints about e.tv's explicit late night programmes.

Conservative

In short, consumers the world over have become a lot more conservative. It pretty much started about a decade or so ago when Janet Jackson was singing the United States national anthem at an annual super bowl extravaganza.

She "accidentally" exposed one of her breasts and the result was a wave of protest that swept across the United Sates.

This new global conservatism has been created by a number of things. It started round about the time of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade towers. Americans got an enormous shock and one of the by-products was a huge part of the nation withdrawing into a soul-searching shell of conservatism.

Something else that has added impetus to this phenomenon is the increase in governments bent on turning their countries into nanny states. The often ludicrous health and safety legislation that has been swamping the United Kingdom is a classic example.

And here in South Africa, government is, under the guise of protecting the consumer, applying regulations that are effectively removing individual responsibility and creating perceptions that, for example, parents no longer have to bring up their children because government will do it for them.

The recent food labelling legislation is a case in point. Instead of disallowing untruths on product labelling government has simply stopped brands from claiming anything - both good and bad on their labelling. Not being able to claim substantiated product benefits is not only paranoid, but verging on Stalinist.

Influence of politics

And the more governments take over the role of parents, the more those parents will find themselves becoming a lot more conservative and offended by takings they would not have worried about a decade or so ago.

One just has to look, for example, at what advertisements were quite acceptable in South Africa 10 or 15 years ago and which today would not get past the increasingly despotic ad industry censors.

The lesson that marketers and particularly those involved in advertising and communications, can take out of this is that commercial conversations with consumers these days have to allow for increasing consumer conservatism.

Shock tactics, as Nando's have found with their recent well-meaning "xenophobia" ad campaign, simply do not make economic or marketing sense anymore .

Mass marketing is expensive. Far too expensive for those who produce advertising to keep accepting that you cannot please all of the people all of the time.

Be all things

The point is, nowadays you simply have to do everything possible to please everyone otherwise your return on marketing funds employed is going to look pretty darn sickly.

The thing is that consumers are desperate for someone to trust. They have been let down by banks, accounting firms, churches, politicians and government agencies - you name it.

This presents brands with a wonderful opportunity: To do everything in their power to get as many consumers to trust them. And that is only going to happen if marketers understand that the consumer of today is a lot more conservative, gets offended a lot more easily and really does not like being shocked into taking notice of what brands are trying to tell them.

I have been working for the past ten years on a project I call "The Consumer of the Future" and it is quite remarkable how the consumer of 2012 differs so much from the consumer of 2002.

I am certainly someone who believes in the digital age, but quite frankly far too many marketers are so obsessive about things like social media that they have their heads so far upon their digital arses they have completely forgotten all-important marketing fundamentals and the fact that the psyche of the consumer is changing dramatically.