The Death of the TV-Industrial Complex
Mass marketing is dead — create remarkable products that the right people seek out instead of interrupting everyone
The TV-Industrial Complex describes the now-broken symbiotic system where companies bought TV ads, ads drove sales, sales funded more ads, and everyone prospered. This system created behemoths like P&G, Revlon, and General Foods. But consumers stopped paying attention, markets became crowded, and the cycle collapsed. Companies that keep trying to re-create the glory days waste billions, while those that invest in remarkable products win.
- The old rule: create safe, ordinary products and combine them with great marketing
- The new rule: create remarkable products that the right people seek out
- Consumers are post-consumption — they have everything they need and most of what they want, except time
- Awareness is not the point — Kmart has plenty of awareness, and it doesn't matter
- Just about all ways marketers promote themselves are becoming less effective
- The marketing department taking a nearly finished product and spending money to communicate its benefits no longer works
- Diagnose Your Addiction to the Old SystemIdentify where your company still relies on the TV-Industrial Complex cycle: build a factory, buy ads, ads lead to distribution and sales, sales fund more ads. Recognize that this virtuous cycle has broken because consumers no longer respond to interruption-based marketing the way they once did.
- Acknowledge the Three Market RealitiesAccept the new landscape: all the obvious targets are gone so people don't have easily solved problems; consumers are hard to reach because they ignore you; and satisfied customers are less likely to tell their friends about incremental improvements.
- Shift from Advertising to Product InvestmentMove the money and effort you used to spend on frequent ad purchases to repeated engineering expenses and product innovation. The hard work now comes earlier in the process — designing products that are virus-worthy from the start — rather than promoting mediocre products after the fact.
- Target Influence, Not VolumeThe marketer of yesterday valued the volume of people she could reach. Today, a group's value is related to its influence, not its size. The early adopters heavily influence the rest of the adoption curve, so persuading them is worth far more than wasting ad dollars on the early and late majority.
- Accept Dying Products and ReinvestIf a product's future is unlikely to be remarkable — if you can't imagine people being fascinated by it again — take profits and reinvest them in building something new. Orthodox Purple Cow thinking means cutting spending on tired products and putting incremental profits into radical and interesting new offerings.
Godin drew the parallel to the military-industrial complex, observing that for fifty years a different symbiotic relationship created far more wealth: find a large market niche, build a factory, buy TV ads, use profits for more ads. He documented its decline by noting that companies like P&G built empires on this cycle, but by the 2000s, even their brand managers couldn't make it work the way it used to.