Learning From The Grand Masters Of Marketing
Interview with Russell Kern, CEO and Founder of The Kern Organization
Topic: Learning From The Grand Masters Of Marketing
Question: Does studying the pioneers of modern marketing such as Claude C. Hopkins, who wrote Scientific Advertising in 1923, still relevant with today's modern advertising and marketing techniques and technology?
Russell Kern: Learning from the Grand Masters is more important today than ever before. I know that marketers feel like the knowledge that was written in 1920, 1940 or 1950 isn't relevant. But the truth is; if you want to become a great marketer, just as if you wanted to become a great painter, you would invest the time to study the great works of the greatest artists by going to the museums and looking at their work and understanding their techniques.
The works written in the 40's, 50's and 60's by Ogilvy, Stone, by Cobb, by Throckmorton, by Trout and Rice, are extremely relevant today- because they are the foundation of marketing principle, they're the foundation of psychology, and the motivation of human behavior.
Understanding those foundational principles are relevant to setting testing structures today, writing messages today, understanding what are the key motivators or drivers today, and its crucially fundamental to study the Grand Masters.
Question: Even the title of his book, Scientific Advertising back in 1923 leads us to the next question; which is, do you believe that advertising is more scientific today than when Claude Hopkins wrote that book?
Russell Kern: Well, I think that advertising has the opportunity to be more scientific today than ever before. I don't know whether or not we have scientists in the field of marketing today. We have the ability to have very complex testing, we have the ability to deploy large scale multivariate testing, but whether marketers have the discipline and the knowledge on how to set up tests, run tests, analyze tests, sometimes can be in question.
I think that the other things that marketers face is the "overwhelm." In the 20's, 30's, 40's, it was relatively a single channel, a print ad, a piece of direct mail, they would run the experiment, you would do an A-B test, you would find out what the result was and there wasn't a lot of confusion.
Today, the pressure to have every channel perform, the pressure to see how to optimize every channel, which sometimes means that we are doing a lot all at once, but never going back to the basics and fundamentals, to analyze each test, what the result is, to create a book of knowledge and to have constant improvement as part of the marketing process.
Source
Tags: Direct Mail Campaign, Direct Mail Marketing, Marketing
Categories: Direct Mail Marketing
