Post-Modern Marketing is a view of our industry’s fast-approaching future that will likely scare many but excites the hell out of me. It is driven by the breathtakingly fast advancement of digital technology and its myriad ramifications. Yet it is driven equally by a high-touch reaction and re-set – a necessary reclamation of marketing’s roots which lie at the core of human emotion.

The Post-Modern essence of marketing’s rapidly arriving future is this:

• The technologies that brought us Modern Marketing – digital detection of audience members’ “information exhaust, ” the big data analytics to interpret it and the programmatic systems that automate marketing activities based on it – continue to rapidly evolve.
• Natural language recognition and artificial intelligence are layering atop that Modern Marketing technology stack to enable highly personal – and in fact, individualized – conversations between brands and each audience member, automated and at scale.
• Together, these technologies dramatically raise the bar on brand and customer experience, enabling brand drivers and business objectives to be automatically embedded into all forms of brand-customer interactions – leading to the emergence of a kind of omni-experiential brand-as-platform.
• But none of this can succeed without harking back to marketing’s “pre-modern” era – finding and leveraging brands’ (and customers’) emotional truths.

Post-Modern Marketing is the next logical and necessary progression in marketing’s transformation over the past 30+ years from pre-modern to modern to postmodern; from interrupt-driven advertising and mass media to the emotional, psychological, technological and scientific truths at the center of all future customer interaction.

In future posts, I'll endeavor to map this journey and mark its progress. We invite your thinking; we invite you to challenge our own. Necessary as it has been, the transformation we’ve experienced in recent years is table stakes for what lies ahead.

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