Caudillos
January 20, 2015
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.