Caudillos

By Gonzalo López Martí – LMMIAMI.COM

• For marketers operating in 2015 it certainly helps to have a resident influencer on payroll.
• Not figuratively, literally.
• See Steve Jobs & Apple, Richard Branson & Virgin or Elon Musk & Tesla.
• Entrepreneurs & managers are coming out from behind the scenes to take center stage.
• CEOs are celebs now.
• It’s not ego.
• Well it’s not ego alone.
• It’s sound marketing.
• Way more effective than, say, schmoozing a star blogger to write a favorable review or signing a celeb-for-hire to talk pretty about your product.
• A celeb CEO can “carry” a brand the same way a celeb actor can “carry” a movie.
• Simply because he/she has skin in the game.
• Real skin.
• Literally.
• In the flesh.
• It’s not new, mind you.
• Think Orville Redenbacher, Lee Iacocca or that annoying dude from Papa John’s.
• We need to believe there’s a human being behind the products and services we buy.
• We need to root for them.
• We beg for charisma.
• We need heroes.
• Unfortunately, we don’t really believe in teamwork, as much as we say we do.
• We want to believe president Obama personally typed the entire 30,000 pages of Obamacare on his Oval Office laptop.
• Life is more simple this way.
• We worship the self.
• Caudillos.
• Business has borrowed a page from politics, where a last name is brand name.
• Bush, Clinton, Cuomo, Romney.
• Zuckerberg, Branson, Bezos, Kalanick.
• Which leads to another, more philosophical question: if we supposedly live in the age of flattened hierarchies, democratization of information and hyper-collaboration, why do we still need familiar faces in positions of power?
• What if power has become empty & purely symbolic.
• It’s what Venezuelan political commentator & writer Moisés Naim says in his last book The end of power.
• Maybe the powerful have no real power anymore.
• Not even to set the agenda.
• Maybe they are just chasing after opinion polls, always one step behind public sentiment, the 24-hour news cycle and the social media buzz, desperately trying to pin down an ever-elusive discourse while keeping appearances in a purely reactive mode.
• Stay tuned.