Welcome Back to the Reimagine Marketing Podcast
BRIAN ALFOND: Hello, folks, and welcome to season three of the Reimagine Marketing. Podcast. If you've been here before, you may notice that things sound a little different. I'm your new host, Brian Alfond. I'm part of SAS's Global Customer Intelligence group, and I work with customers to find elegant and creative solutions to their marketing problems.
I've been in and around marketing for longer than I care to admit out loud. Let's just say that I'm firmly ensconced in Generation X. And over this time, I've seen trends come and go, buzzwords born and then often die in the same week, technology that tries to solve every imaginable problem, and technology that creates every unimaginable problem.
Looking over the past 10 years alone, the pace of change in the marketing space seems to be, if I may borrow from an influencer of mine, at ludicrous speed. And while things haven't quite yet gone plaid, it does appear that we are on the verge of a traditional tartan. And if you didn't catch that reference, please do look up gone plaid.
For a quick comparison, consider this. My grandfather was born in 1899. This was a time before airplanes, heck before cars were really common, although many of the cars around at this time were electric cars. When he was a boy, he heard about the Wright brothers' success at Kitty Hawk.
In his retirement years, he watched Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon on a 12-inch black-and-white TV. And in his eldest years, he saw the space shuttle retired from service on a 44-inch flat screen. Imagine the scope of change to his world and what he had to adapt to, and imagine how fast he must have thought that pace was.
I know it seems that things are changing even faster now, not only in marketing, but in all aspects of the modern, connected life. But for all this activity, are things actually changing all that much? Because I have a feeling that, while the pace of change is indeed frenetic, this is more the result of changes to technology. We aren't truly changing what marketing, or really life, is at all. And this is what I find fascinating. And this is what I hope to explore in upcoming episodes of this podcast.
I hope to go beyond technology to the human aspects of things like privacy, the metaverse, social media and dopamine exhaustion, and how marketers are trying to keep pace with each new technology and trend. But I want to work from the foundational idea that the purpose of marketing itself hasn't changed much at all. All marketing is still an attempt at a mutually beneficial conversation between two entities, and that the goal of marketing now is the same as it was when the first Mog's Mammoth Meats advertisement was painted on a cave somewhere.
While the only voice you're hearing at the moment is my own, we certainly will have conversations here where, as we say where I'm from, wicked smart people can exchange their thoughts and opinions, and I get to learn something new. Hopefully you, the listener, will, too. And to be clear, the thoughts and opinions that I express on this podcast are my own, and could very well be misinformed, misguided, and even blatantly wrong. This being the internet, I'm sure there are folks who will disagree with my views and who will politely, helpfully, and constructively offer their own point of view and perspectives in a calm and respectful manner. Well, one can always hope, anyway.
So thanks for listening so far. Next time, we will actually delve into one of these topics and see how it goes. Until then, I hope all the important things in your life are good.
