“MARKETING is dead.” So said Kevin Roberts, boss of Saatchi & Saatchi, earlier this year. Generating headlines for his company as it did, there was an obvious irony to his remarks. Still, the death of marketing is regularly reported in the academic literature; social media and the internet are usually cited as prime suspects in its dispatch. It is hyperbole, though. The channels may have changed but the underlying principles of marketing remain true. “The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it,” wrote Dale Carnegie in 1936. It might be a strategy for a brand’s Facebook campaign today.
