Annoying Design

Yahoo will debut new branding in the fall, courtesy of a newly-hired CMO. Futurelab has an interesting take on how what most marketing execs do: burn through media money and leave.

She  has a newly hired coterie of her favorite branding gurus. There’s nothing surprising about this news: one of the first things new top marketers usually do is hire new vendors to reinvigorate or change the brand.  It’s what they do.

Here’s what usually happens next:

• Within about 18 months or so, she or he gets fired because the beautiful new branding didn’t have any measurable impact on the business
• The exec swaps jobs with another similarly failed exec at another company
• They trade vendors, and hire new teams to do new branding, and
• Repeat

What this means for ad agencies and marketing firms is that they need to start reaching into other parts of the enterprise than the marketing team. Agencies can’t just keep working with middle-level marketing managers, who approach things from a narrow, “my-way-or-the-highway” perspective.

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