Visionary Marketing was created in 1995 and will therefore celebrate its 30-year anniversary in 2025. One fine day in 1995, in the middle of summer, the Marketing & Innovation website was created. Archive.org platform won’t be able to go back any further than 1998, so you’ll have to take my word for it. This milestone gives me a unique opportunity to take a step back and ponder over three decades of content creation dedicated to Marketing and Innovation.
Visionary Marketing: 30-year anniversary in 2025
The site initially served as a base for evangelising about the new medium that was the World Wide Web, invented a few years earlier (1989) by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Contrary to what some would argue, the Web was not empty back then. Websites abounded, visitors were undoubtedly a little less numerous but more curious, as they were discovering this new mode of communication.
A Period of Intense Creativity
It was a period of intense creativity and innovation. I’ve lost count of the number of friends I made in those years. You’d make a comment and a Welshman living in the United States would come and visit you in London to say hello and chit-chat with you. Truly amazing days.
Most of the content was made of longform pieces. PowerPoint presentations were numerous on the site too and attracted a large number of visitors. The name of the website comes from a document I wrote that year. It was modelled on the so-called visionary method of Henri Egea, our head of consultancy at Unisys. Henri sadly passed away in mid-2010. He was a rather whimsical but fascinating character. He shaped the thinking of many consultants by putting us in the footsteps of Henri Atlan, Bernard Cova and Olivier Badot and above all Edgar Morin and his “introduction to complex thinking“.
Visionary Marketing Way Back in 1995
Visionary Marketing was a name that sounded rather good, it’s still there and I even named my company after it. There was no point in finding another name.
2025 will be dedicated to celebrating these 30 years, but that’s not all. Many projects will be launched, starting with the Man from Mars demos, which you’ll be seeing soon crop up on the site. Produced with Olivier Saint-Léger, who is also the author of the pretty visual below, together we’ll be continuing a more than ten-year collaboration on marketing, strategy, creativity and photography.
More will be unveiled later but, in the meantime, let’s give our followers a bit of a read. Here is the initial Visionary Marketing document, highly visionary for its time.
Visionary Marketing: the founding document of our site
At the time, I was talking about “Marketing-Orientated Information Systems“. This was a way of bridging the gap between marketing and Information Systems, my job at the time. I was indeed designing applications for sales and marketing people (and financial controllers who supervised margins and sales).
Since then, the vocab has changed a lot. MarTech and SalesTech are all the rage. And that’s precisely the basis for our forthcoming Man from Mars demos.
