The faster time goes on, the more prejudices take over as absolute rules, unavoidable axioms - and today more than ever in the small world of marketing, which often struggles to keep up with technological and societal developments. For example, it's a good thing that start-ups are there to innovate, because today's big companies are totally incapable of doing so.
Let me make a brief introductory comment: to innovate, start-ups most often rely on technological advances developed by... large companies: because what would Uber and Blablacar be without smartphones and apps?
Fundamental research takes time - for example, the research into the compression of sound files that led to the development of mp3 took almost a quarter of a century and involved a whole consortium of major companies!
If tomorrow's quantum computers take over from our current old - but very useful - machines, their development will owe nothing to start-ups either, but to the combined efforts of multiple research laboratories, both public and private, housed within universities and major groups.
But there's also no doubt that a host of start-ups will follow in their wake, offering a host of new products and services.
The specialist press points the finger at the most promising start-ups, the ones that are going to revolutionise their sector... but not everyone is Google or Airbnb!
The website 1001startups estimates that 10,000 start-ups have been created in the last 5 years, and that "almost 90% of start-ups fail". But all of them dream of joining the dream team of 150 global unicorns - those worth more than a billion dollars.
90% of failure: a figure not unlike that put forward by Jean-Claude Andréani in 2001 in the Revue Française du Marketing In 10 years, the failure rate for new product launches will have risen from an average of 40% for consumer goods, industrial products and services to 95% in the USA and 90% in Europe".
In other words, start-ups are not the only ones to innovate, nor are they the only ones to succeed - or even fail. So why are these new businesses so popular?
Because hitting the jackpot seems so simple: it's almost like the Lotto! Anyone can (or thinks they can) hit the jackpot...
We're back to the old fundamentals of supply-side marketing; on the pretext that consumers would be incapable of expressing an opinion on projects as disruptive as their own, young entrepreneurs often ignore them completely.
Yet marketing has come a long way since the 1930s: why not show a little modesty and put the odds in your favour by confirming that your future customers are interested in the products and services you want to sell them?
