Are You Humaning?
By: Reuben Salsa
Tags: Marketing, Salsa, The Bad Influence, Humor, Ideas

MARKETING

Are You Humaning?

Photo by Diggity Marketing on Unsplash

You’re the new marketing director of a big company. You feel the need to make an impact. You need something big. Something impressive. Something that’ll define your time at corporate HQ. You want people to sit up and take notice. So what do you do?

If you were the new CMO of Mondelēz, you may decide to invent a new term that’ll cut through all the bollocks of old marketing. It’ll still have the same values as the old marketing models, but more buzz. It’ll have pizzazz. It’ll have sparkle. It’ll resonate deeply with everyone who had a shitty 2020. It’ll be ubiquitous and easy to understand. It’ll have more grassroots appeal that your local community garden.

The verb you’ll be looking for would be ‘HUMANING’ and it’ll always appear in full caps and bold lettering.

You wouldn’t (or couldn’t) be stopped there. Despite the shock and marketing fatigue that’ll greet your announcement from your team, you’ll plow on regardless. You’ve got their attention now. Global snack foods will never be the same again. You’ve broken the fourth wall. You’ve become the paradigm in one seismic shift. You’re the emperor with the new clothes and ain’t nobody telling you how stupid it all sounds.

“Today,” a suitably millennial voice announces in the new corporate video, “we need to stop marketing and start HUMANING”.

Oh my god, it’s fucking genius. Nobody knows exactly what it means but everybody knows what it could mean. It’s saying everything but literally saying nothing. It’s lighter than Light Buzzyear and stormier than Stormy Daniels. It’s a pearl of wisdom that transcends the ages.

You have just bullshitted the bullshitters. Where do you go from here?

Your next step is making a video. A deluxe piece of art that sums up your entire premise of ‘HUMANING’. It’ll be the type of video that’ll win awards for lighting. You’ll have diversity. You’ll have families. You’ll have simple pleasures.

It’s marketing made right for snacking made right.

Can snacking ever be made wrong? Is there a wrong way to snack? Maybe in London where you’re eating Doritos with machine-gun toting gangsters. Certainly an air of danger then. It’s definitely the wrong way to snack unless you’re in the gang and not looking for trouble. I digress. Let’s get back to the new guy and making an impact.

You would have to be so far removed from reality that this all sounds very normal to you. You’ve bought into your own bollocks. You can no longer smell the stink that’s been whiffing about you. Your team isn’t about to take the hit. They’re not telling you anything. They’re rolling with it. These clothes fit you just right. Michael’s smirking in the corner. He knows where this is heading. Deniability is playing out in his head.

The air’s too thin up here with the gods. No consumer has made it that far. The gravity of normal has sunk without a trace.

Your team is with you. You have your spanking new video. Corporate isn’t saying anything negative, at least not to your face. You’re ready to launch this mother out to the world. It’s simply a case of standing back and riding the wave of applause.

Except…

There is no applause. Or clapping. Or awards. Only derision. The slow-handclap of the mocking crowd. Silence would’ve been preferable. No matter how earnest you felt, or how comfortable you were with your concept, you realize you’ve made a terrible, terrible, mistake.

If only you listened to your wife when she said “I don’t get it.”

You smiled and told her ‘you will’. It’s what all of humanity has been waiting for. You know now that what you most needed was to listen. Actively engage in the conversation when your good friend told you you’re totally full of shit. You needed to have a certain level of awareness.

And how did Mondelēz CMO Martin Renaud pitch this?

“We started to think: What is so unique about our brands and categories?” he explained on launch. “That is where this idea for connecting to people and connecting with humans came from and that is how we arrived at ‘HUMANING’.”

Where storytelling becomes storydoing.

Martin took all of the criticism on board. He stood firmly behind his beliefs. He wasn’t about to back down. As social media tore him to shreds, he issued a statement to PR Week that, he hoped for more criticism of his new concept so he can “grow together” with the critics.

Way to go Martin.