A historical perspective from a blogpost written by a newly graduated marketing professional seventeen years from now…

Even before graduating from Crystal Lake South High School in 2027, I had my mind set on getting my bachelor’s, followed by an MBA with an emphasis in marketing. My Uncle was a well-known marketing consultant and everybody in the family knew he would be spending more time analyzing commercials than watching the shows on TV like the rest of us. He did the same thing with web ads, billboards, anything that showed off a product or talked about a company. At the time, I could not for the life of me figure out why he thought so much about something I completely ignored. When I was about ten, I asked him what he did at his job. He simply answered, “I’m in marketing.” My obvious response and every kid’s go to question at ten was, “Why?” His answer was a pretty good simplification of what I later discovered to be a very complicated industry.

“People are always gonna buy stuff, and companies always need someone to make their stuff look better than the other guy.”

In the years since my Uncle and I watched those old commercials, TV has changed considerably. Network television really only has sports programming left. The Super Bowl and Bracket Battles (did you know that at one time they called it March Madness! If you can believe such a term as insensitive to mental illness was ever used). And they still rule in the reality show market. They are still a staple, like Inmate Island, and I have to pause for a minute to give a little review on it because this was my all-time favorite show!

The first season of Inmate Island revived the networks because all they had left was sports. Did you watch anything over the air with all those commercials anymore? Right, no one else was either. Then Inmate Island debuted (and all the networks copied it, but this was always the best) to ratings the networks hadn’t seen for decades. Getting wanted criminals to think that they were being asked to star on a reality show and then going to the Island, only to find out they were there to serve a prison sentence! Genius! We all thought it couldn’t last. Clearly the “contestants” would start to realize that it was all a ruse, but it went on for five years. Then when people actually started turning themselves in just to get on the show, we got all the bad copies of the original. And it did push crime rates to one of the lowest levels in history.

But we don’t see many of those old-time commercials anymore. Who would pay attention to something they aren’t interested in buying anyway? When I started writing my essay for Harvard Business School, I interviewed my Uncle about the history of marketing, and he told me that much of marketing used to be about generating brand awareness and creating a need for products. Back in 2017, when he started his business, consumers didn’t create their own buying journey, it was laid out for them by the companies selling the products. That was when he pioneered a little something called, Consumer Generated Pathway Marketing Strategy (CGPM) and yes you guessed it, my Uncle is that guy!

At about this same time many of the large brands were fading, being replaced by the smaller, agile companies delivering personalized products and services that are the norm today. It was also right before the Great Retail Rift, the single biggest revolution in consumer products history. This was the start of Conveyed (once called “online”) and Footstep (formerly known as brick and mortar) sales and marketing.

There were a bunch of old online companies, Amazon and Alibaba were the largest right before the GRR. Those two went from being a part of the online sales market, to owning over 90% of the Conveyed Marketplace. Due mostly to mergers and acquisitions of what was left of the big brands. The Footstep Marketplace has been totally dominated by the Wal-Malls, and I’ll get back to that in just a minute. Only twenty-five percent of the Footstep Marketplace is owned by upscale specialty and local small business. The social implications of this new market dynamic were predicted by a few, but no one anticipated how far reaching it would become. The social class lines had been clearly drawn for each marketplace.

The Wal-Malls concept was brilliant in its formation – taking even the visionary Jeff Bezos by surprise as he began what was thought would be his masterstroke to corner both the Conveyed and Footstep markets. Long before Amazon’s attempted Footstep entry, Wal-Mart (the original name for Wal-Mall Express) began quietly buying up struggling indoor malls, investing an estimated 85 billion dollars in what would become the Footstep equivalent to Amazon’s stronghold on the Conveyed marketplace. With the collapse of the traditional “Brick and Mortar”, Wal-Mart made the seamless and unanticipated move to re-open these properties as Wal-Malls.

Before Consumer Generated Pathway Marketing, all the tactics and strategies of marketing were essentially what they had always been – generating demand for a product or service.

As one of the founding fathers of CGPM, my uncle had always professed one simple idea: “The pinnacle of marketing is creating an unseen influence on consumer behavior.”

To him marketing was an invisible hand, guiding the consumer towards what they wanted and needed without generating a “perceived” need. He spent years perfecting methods for creating customer journey maps and company story maps – analyzing data and overlaying both maps with personas and touchpoints that intersected flawlessly. It was his work that produced the first Effortless Buying Journey. Used by both Amazon and Alibaba, CGPM effectively put those two companies firmly in control of the Conveyed Marketplace.

Since then, the top goal for every marketing team, every marketing consultant, every company in the marketplace has been to re-create the effortless buying journey he designed.

My Uncle wrote in his famous textbook, The Last Marketing Method – “Even with all the strides we’ve made with Consumer Generated Pathway Marketing Strategy, we are still at the forefront of a movement that still does what marketing has always done, and that is to try to create demand for a product, regardless of customer needs. When the consumer journey and company story perfectly align across every channel, then CGPM strategy will form an organic path to purchase for the consumer as intended. As marketers we still affect too much of that path to purchase. When the entire pathway is originated, initiated, piloted and accomplished with no apparent influence from the producer, marketing will truly become integrated into the marketplace itself.”

Since finishing my college education, I have interned with my Uncle’s company and my one goal is to finish what he started and build an algorithm that anyone can use to create an effortless buying journey. As my Uncle predicted, and I agree, this will in essence, end marketing as we know it. The buying journey will be completely driven by the consumer. The company story will be uploaded and integrated to the pathway and all that will be left for marketing is in the hands of the creatives.

I kinda miss all those old commercials now that I think about it.