The New Global Economy. It’s here.
I recently came across some fascinating insights from UK-based entrepreneur Daniel Priestley and thought I’d share what I’m learning.
The global economy has fundamentally shifted.
In the industrial economy, we were taught that knowledge is the key to success, time and skills are valuable and the goal was to sell our time for money. What he calls “standard component labour”. In the new global digital economy, knowledge is ubiquitous. And, in most cases, free. So, what does one’s specialised formal education mean? What will a legal or finance degree mean in three or four years’ time? These degrees will not be irrelevant, but their applications will be different.
AI won’t change the need for leaders to demonstrate human judgement, intuition, strategic courage, communication skills, leadership and mentoring” *McKinsey. AI will accelerate, challenge and validate ideas and strategies.
“AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI will.”
Considering that we were educated as “standard component labour” - The currency is now IP which we exchange for attention, vs skills and time exchanged for money.
The Shift: From Corporate to Personal Brands
For decades, corporations and big brands had all the marketing power. Power is now swinging from corporations to individual brands.
Consider:
- Mark Zuckerberg is Meta.
- Fenty is Rihanna.
- Richard Branson has more followers than Virgin does
- Jeff Bezos is Amazon
Priestley proposes that we have to learn to sell what’s in our brain - our IP. And, we have to learn to sell how and why our IP is worth listening to. We have to become creators instead of spectators. He (Priestley) predicts that we will see a trend of corporate CEOs trying to get onto popular podcasts to present a human face and company persona to their audience.
So, What Are You Selling?
It’s no longer just selling time or knowledge. The answer: our thinking, our expertise, our perspective - the stuff in our brains.
We have to learn how to package and sell what’s in our heads - explore what we know, how we’ve contributed to solving X problem and create a business model which demonstrates your value.
We have to shift from being spectators to creators.
Personal brands connect with people on an emotional level.. People feel like they “know you” from your social media presence, they celebrate and commiserate with you. This is the success we’ve seen from influencers on social media. This emotional connection is pivotal to commercial success. Customers buy from people they like and trust - sometimes it's a corporate brand, but less and less so.
Historically, brands have spent fortunes on building brand love, but if the ability of big companies' brands to connect or sell to customers is declining in this new economy, considering the rise of personal brand equity, what is the future role of advertising?Assuming this is true, what does this mean to marketers?
- In 2010, 28% of the world had fast internet
- In 2025, 70% have fast internet access
Marketers now have billions of people to talk to and “everyone” is a potential customer, each of them receiving about 60 billion messages a day. Your audience has become global and geography is irrelevant.
Geography used to be important. We knew exactly how to segment and target markets, understand media consumption behaviour and we (in South Africa) relied heavily on the “Socio-Economic Measure” for data on economic status and behaviour *(SEM formally LSM).
We can’t approach marketing like we used to. Media strategies and messaging have to be more single minded than ever and targeted at a very specific niche market, which is not a new rule in marketing, it’s just that the audience is now “everyone” and it’s very easy for “everyone” to ignore you.