The late British political scientist Sir Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” refers to an old adage: The fox knows many things, while the hedgehog knows one big thing. This comes to mind because many books by marketing gurus offer hedgehog theories: The one and only solution to all marketing problems.
Of the three books with hedgehog theories reviewed here, the most worthy is “Another One Bites the Grass” (John Wiley & Sons, $29.95). Yes, grass. The point author Simon Anholt makes is that the perils of global marketing can be avoided with a bit of creativity and cultural awareness. The title, incidentally, comes from Germany, where another one bites the grass, not the dust.
What Anholt sees biting the grass is the old, traditional agency, which he believes is too cumbersome and unresponsive to meet today’s multicultural marketing needs.
Anholt, of course, has the solution: Pointing out the dangers of translating marketing campaigns between cultures, he suggests that the campaigns be designed multiculturally. His agency, World Writers Ltd., operates on this principle for such clients as Time Warner, Sony and IBM. To do what he calls “culturally relevant creativity,” Anholt uses multicultural creative teams.
If marketing were music, this would be world beat.
Of course, those cumbersome, old-fashioned international agencies may not have the answers Anholt does, but their answers boost sales enough for their clients to be willing to pay extravagant fees. And their client lists are just as prestigious as Anholt’s.
What makes Anholt’s book worth considering, though, are the questions he raises and the analysis he provides about the issues of marketing in an increasingly multicultural and international environment. His discussion about why campaigns have to be recreated within cultures, and not just translated and transplanted, are impressive and provocative.
It’s also hard not to like a book that scores against general advertising agencies for their condescending attitudes toward direct marketing, even if his own take is a trifle odd. He sees direct marketing best used for event marketing. But he’s also an advocate of branding and integrated marketing, of which he believes direct is an integral part.
Like Anholt, Guy Barefoot believes he has an ideal business model. But unlike Anholt, Barefoot is more interested in praising the paradigm than in profiling the problem and the process.
“The Quixtar Revolution” (Prima Publishing, $15.95) maintains that the corporate culture of the Internet business will revolutionize the business world. The model for this hedgehog theory is Quixtar, an e-commerce company that mixes affiliate marketing with a classic DM-style membership club and a non-hierarchical corporate structure. The latter gives the book its subtitle – “Discover the new high-tech, high-touch world of marketing.” This corporate structure tries to engender entrepreneurship in its employees by heeding what they want personally and professionally. This structure should also support the idea that a smaller, tighter team gets big jobs done better.
None of this is exactly new to direct marketing commerce, let alone direct marketing e-commerce. And it’s hard to feel that Quixtar, which was established in September 1999, has enough of a track record to be considered revolutionary.
Dave Saunders has produced “Twentieth Century Advertising” (Carlton, $40), which aims to examine the era’s “most famous campaigns, slogans and personalities.” The book proclaims as its hedgehog theory: Advertising is “the dominant force in the 20th century…affecting, reflecting and creating social trends.”
Because he focuses on the campaigns – and often the brands behind the campaigns – and not the theory, he creates a potential back-seat driver in every reader who wants to second-guess his selection of most famous. “Where’s Coppertone?” “Where are Cabbage Patch Dolls?” readers may ask.
To those who would cite omissions, you can add those who would question what’s included: Saunders definitely favors anti-fur and -smoking advertising to, say, such famous campaigns as Blackglama’s “What becomes a legend most?” or even Benson & Hedges’ “Silly millimeter longer.”
Since Saunders, also a photographer, has produced such volumes as “Sex in Advertising” and “Fantasy in Advertising,” we may assume he knew the job was dangerous (and challenging) when he took it. Titles that claim all-inclusiveness always leave themselves open to criticism.
But the faults of this book add up to much more than errors in judgment over what to include and exclude. The book proves to be a classic coffee-table volume: not well researched, not well developed, but with lots of pretty pictures. Worse, it focuses almost exclusively on classic space or TV ads, paying little if any attention to direct marketing.
For example, he highlights Sandeman Port for being among the first to brand its image (1805); use direct marketing (1900); and take the famous silhouette (of the man in a black cape holding a glass of red port) and use it for its product labels as well as its ads (1928). Other than a historical outline not much longer than a label, we get nothing on how those sales channels integrate as branding opportunities or why the Sandeman “poster boy” is such an enduring brand image.
Saunders points out how a number of advertising slogans have entered the language: Alka-Seltzer’s “Try it, you’ll like it,” and Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” Yet he misses John Caples’ famous “They laughed when I sat down at the piano” ad for direct mail piano lessons.
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