Make no mistake: technology and internet – that literally put the world at our fingertips – have completely reshaped marketing. While it relied on intuition and epiphany in the past, today it overwhelmingly bets on information; as an effect, creativity has become subordinated to data, which made one-on-one marketing – at scale – possible. Impressive! And yet, numbers can only do so much: yes, they reveal patterns, but it is understanding what’s behind them that’s important.

What data does is provide us with a code which we’ll need to decrypt to find the why behind every human action, thought or feeling.

Because marketing is not meant to respond to, but to show & tell consumers what they want, and the best way to do that is through stories. In fact, marketing has a long tradition in using storytelling to picture an ideal world for us, building on our desire to always want something else; here, where all our dreams may come true, we can find meaning and fulfillment, as well as new objects of belief.

Each of these stories is orchestrated towards a very practical end goal – the sale – on a promise that is the cornerstone of marketing. The beloved discount, ever so efficient because it peels off all our carefully-built layers to reveal and lever our most basic human truth: we live our lives trying to buy more time.

Perhaps this is why we let ourselves seduced by marketing stories and promises… they give us: Power and Time. – Cristi MIHAI, MP, STRATEGAD.

In the end, centuries of practice, technology and internet – they have brought us to an age of humanism in marketing, that reveals, beyond numbers and intuition, the individual.