Why was understanding Starbucks’ purpose crucial to the coffee company’s financial health? Why did a US-based cosmetics company establish a business partnership with an Amazonian tribe? How did Bing increase the usage of its search engine by inspiring people to search offline? And how did the beverage giant Coca-Cola end up producing a chart-topping song and accompanying music video?
The world around us is changing at a rate so fast that, in the struggle to keep up, we often lose track of the underlying causes, implications and consequences of these transformations. The marketing and advertising industries are undoubtedly arenas in which these changes seem to be occurring most frequently. Almost every news source within these industries appears to be publishing a stream of articles announcing yet another innovation, another promotional experiment, another change in the way that major corporations conduct business. Everyone has an opinion, observing the shifts in trends and drawing lines of causation, but few stand back and find a central cause, a catalyst for all of these changes.
In The Multidimensional Agency I provide an overview of the latest thinking on marketing and advertising, drawn from a variety of both industry and academic sources. Taking note of the rise in human-centric marketing and corporate social responsibility, the increasing disposition of businesses towards collaboration, as well as the shifting role of marketing communication, I seek to provide guidelines for how the advertising industry can adapt its practices to meet the changing landscapes of technology, media and society at large.