The iPod generation looks for honesty, not marketing spin

Is the growing dominance of an online business culture an opportunity or a threat for the marketing and PR industries? The shift to B2B and B2C from conventional offline channels offers huge opportunities, but only if marketing and PR experts reinvent themselves. There is still too much complacency among senior marketing professionals who have been brought up in the 'old school' and who are predominantly male, pale and stale.

For too many of them, the online world is a niche. Certainly they regard it as growing and important, but they still interpret it as one that can be incorporated within the old, fixed and taken-for-granted marketing paradigms.

If only the 21st century were as simple as that. The consumer market is being revolutionised by the radical new psychologies of Generation Y and, within this category, what I describe as the iPod generation. These are the highly educated and talented young men and women of diverse ethnic and national cultures who will make up a growing proportion of the affluent, high-spending consumers of the coming decades. How do they decide which goods and services to buy? What channels of selection do they use? How do they research what is available to them?

We already have clues to these future trends. Have you noticed how little TV these young men and women watch? And very rarely do they watch programmes as they are directly transmitted. Instead, they pre-record and then replay, fast-forwarding through the ads.

The laptops and PDAs have taken over. The iPod generation lives in an almost completely digitalised world, in online global communities in which interpersonal communication is spontaneous, egalitarian and supportive of intense information and decision-making flows.

The iPod generation is in control. No one tells them what to buy or – and this also has important ramifications for companies that want to recruit this talent in the future – what to do. They will not be told, as in old-fashion management, how they should work and perform tasks. They expect to sort things out for themselves.

As consumers they are not persuaded by the marketing and selling strategies of corporations. The top-down approaches through TV, radio and press channels cut little ice with this growing category of affluent consumers. Instead, they are persuaded by the advice and experiences of their online friends. So how should the marketing and PR industries respond?

The first challenge they face is the need for rebranding. The iPod generation has little faith in marketing and PR professionals because of an assumption that they do not 'tell the truth' but only what their corporate clients want us to know. All professionals are subject to the same scrutiny. In the past, patients went to their doctors and clients to their lawyers assuming them to be the experts. Not anymore. Today, we check the expert advice online to assess its credibility. Hence the boom in online communities of patients who have been diagnosed with cancer.

There is no alternative but for corporate PR and marketing to tell the truth and be seen to be telling the truth. It is no good a company extolling its green credentials if it has skeletons in the cupboard. Sooner or later an employee will the spill the beans on Facebook or some other community.

This is not to suggest that marketing and PR professionals have been a bunch of dishonest crooks – far from it. But it is no longer any use generating corporate or product spin to consumers who are suspicious and cynical.

Those responsible for PR and marketing strategies need to educate their clients and their bosses that the top-down, controlled information flows of the past don't work any more. The only way to promote products, services and companies is for the spin to be consistent with the reality. We now live in an age of transparency, with consumers expecting honesty and integrity. Talk to any top UK banker or to any overindulgent 'expense claims' MP – they know exactly what I mean.

Richard is emeritus professor in management at the University of Kent. [email protected]