While we in the West tries to shore up the ruins of Marketing, nobody

appears to want to reshape it

The financial crisis has transformed the global marketing world and, at the

same time, discredited many of the ideas regarding advertising, marketing,

consumers and society that were taken for granted in the pre-crisis decades.

Here nobody appears to see the crisis as an opportunity to build a new form of

capitalism. Nobody seems to see that the future can be and most certainly

should be better than the past. Without a doubt the institutions discredited by

the crisis can be replaced with something better, not merely patched up and

restored. Corporations see the crisis entirely as a threat to established ways

of life and modes of thinking. Nobody is presenting a vision, or even a credible

thought, about how the crisis could produce a better tomorrow. The best that

has been offered is a promise to clear up the mess created by previous

corporations.

Without a doubt the new forms of advertising and marketing that must emerge

from the crisis must be very different from the systems that were so badly

damaged in the early 1980. The transformation will not just be a matter of

rewriting some rules or replacing some incompetent people. It will mean

changing the relationship between markets and consumers that has defined each

successive version of marketing. It is time to engage with citizens' anxieties

about the profound problems of pre-crisis marketing and advertising suddenly

revealed in 2008, the creation of an over informed society, clutter, lack of

accountability, the Internet,Social Media and so on. Like all those packaged-up

bundles of bad debt, contemporary advertising has no fundamental value. It

was misplaced faith in future economic growth that drove up the values of 30-

second TV commercials! The Clients spent so much money on advertising

because they believed that they were living in the best of times and that it was

all just a one way street - upwards! We all now know all this wasn't true!