What is the Future of Marketing? It is a question that has, and does, vex me considerably.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Marketing Leadership prompted by Mark Choueke’s call for leadership in Marketing Week. He got a good reception for his article, and rightly so, and he followed it up with “Join the Marketing Plan for Marketers” which is worth reading.
The need for credibility is undoubtedly crucial and we need to avoid our industry turning inwards and defaulting to the seemingly age old, ”we’re not wrong, we are just misunderstood” excuses. We must not default to the position that the solution to any lack of standing as a profession is solved by just needing to “market” marketing within businesses and “to the board”. We need new ideas and a vision for marketing’s role with the organisation.
As I mused on this I turned to my almost untouched (shame on me!) copy of “The Future of Marketing” for inspiration. This beautifully produced book was recently published by the Marketing Society for its 50th Anniversary. My depression deepened as I read the collected thoughts of 50 CEOs, from the “world’s most successful companies”, no less, in answering the question “What role will marketing play in the future success of your business?”
Guess what the answer is? A lot of “consumer is boss”, a truck load of “digital”, some “it’s all about growth” and shockingly little on sustainability (apart from good old Unilever). Andrew Marsden’s introduction boils it all down to “absolute agreement about one thing that will not change” – the battle for consumer’s trust.
What’s interesting about these snippets from these CEOs is that, by definition, what these CEOs think is the status quo. They extrapolate from the current trajectory of the world and their businesses to predict the future. Envisioning a radical future is hard for anyone but it is impossible for them. Incidentally this is compounded by the shocking lack of diversity in the group. Strikingly there were only 2 women and 2 non-white males in the group of 50!
I think marketing is on a collision course with the future. Our current marketing paradigm is inextricably linked to the driving of consumption and the creation of habits of consumption. This is the economic purpose of marketing: to ensure that demand outstrips supply permanently and profitably in a world of plentiful energy and resources. Economic growth has been the single minded outcome upon which we have built our brands, our marketing models and our rasion d’etre.
But unabated growth cannot continue. Rising populations, increasingly “middle class” and consumerist, means that there will be increasing competition for scarce resources. And marketing is already at some level becoming the thing to blame.
My hunch is that the future of marketing is not merely, or even, a “more consumer focused / digital / growth oriented / sustainable” (delete as appropriate) future but a complete reversal of the current paradigm:
We’ve been used to selling more stuff, the future will be about selling less stuff.
We’ve got great at creating new propositions, the future will be making things last.
We’ve become expert at making people value “goods”, the future will be helping people value what is “good” in every facet of their lives.
We’ve used advanced techniques to satisfy consumer wants, the future will be balancing outcomes for the common good.
Just big boned
And lastly we’ve become hooked on helping our businesses, our economies, often our customers, and in turn our wallets grow “fat”. The future of marketing will be helping people enjoy being “thin” by consuming less and conserving more.
This is an exciting opportunity for those businesses and brands, and their marketers, to move into a completely new and fundamentally more future oriented landscape.
How do we get there? I’ll tackle this in my next blog posting which you can get by signing up to the Conservation-Economy.org RSS or Email feed.
What do you think is the Future of Marketing? Have your say below.
Thanks for reading.
Justin
This article was first published on RE:Thinking Marketing & Brands which is my personal blog and site. http://www.basini.com/2010/09/01/the-future-of-marketing/
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s a really interesting question and I read Mark Chouke’s Call of Marketing Leadership. The think that struck me about it is that if, in 15 years of economic growth and inflated marketing budgets (i.e. pre-recession), the marketing community couldn’t string together a solid enough argument for Why Markting Works, then it comes as no surprise that budgets are going to get slashed as soon as the hard times come. So, if Marketing can’t convince the board that ‘we help promote business growth’ during the good times, it’s very unlikely tthat the board are going to believe them during the bad times. Whether the sustainability argument provides a suitable substitute, I’m not sure. If it’s badly argued it could come across as “We can’t convince you that we help things grow, but we can help be more sustainable, which is fundamentally about people consuming less” which the Board may interpret as ‘consuming less = less growth’. Which isn’t going to go down too well either. So, what’s the Future of Marketing? If the Marketing community want to get board recognition then they’ll do what the board wants. If the board wants growth, then they’ll (try and) give them growth. To promote any other agenda may reduce their position, rather than strenghten it. Perhaps the sustainability argument is better coming from somewhere else in the organisation which currently does have the board’s ear?
Jonathan – thanks for your comments.
To my mind the practise of marketing as a driver of growth is a given in business and is understood by the board. Otherwise you’ve got to think why would they have done it pre- or post-recession. That’s not to say that other aspects which might be put under the banner of marketing, like brand building, customer experience, customer understanding etc are completely understood but core process of communicating a product, stimulating demand and selling stuff is seen as valuable.
The trouble is that the marketing processes of achieving that growth, and often the people or players (agencies, consultants etc), that run those processes either don’t understand deeply enough the business model, or they can’t combine the necessary emotional elements with the rational in a convincing manner which undermines the credibility of the profession.
I chatted this through with Mark Choueke yesterday and he pushed back that what I am envisioning is a broader business agenda rather than just a future for marketing. This is true but I also think it is a particular responsibility of marketing because we have taught people to consume and we now need to help them unlearn (see Dan Burgess’ blog on unlearning: http://www.pipelineideas.com/learning-to-unlearn).
I think this is a new conversation for marketing to have which recognises our culpability in where we are today, takes responsibility for doing something about it, provides a new landscape for competitive advantage, and assumes that marketing is not a narrow function but encompasses all externally facing activities such as PR, CSR, corporate communications, stakeholder understanding and, I’d go as far to say, sustainability.
I think any current lack of credibility will be blow away by ideas, vision and leadership.
It’s a really interesting question, this idea of where will it start… Personally I think marketing is too far down the food chain to even be audible in the big orgs on this one, and therefore that the increasing location of sustainability within the marketing function (cf Santi Gowland at Unilever) is bad news not good. Watching the Unilever brief develop was hilarious – the first draft was all about reducing impact and inspiring change; it came back from the mysterious depths of the business with ‘and so doubling sales’ on the end of it. So hypothesis #1 – marketing’s framing as a driver of growth is too well established for anything else to be possible, so we’d do better to save sustainability from marketing, where it will just disappear into the CSR mire that was invented after Shell – I mean, Nigeria, sorry – hung Ken Saro-Wiwa, rather than believe we can inspire change from here.
Justin’s point against this view seems to be that marketing’s still the best hope because marketing’s where the ideas are, and ideas can transcend all the crap. I buy the latter, but as I work outside marketing, I increasingly dismiss the former. I’ve seen more genuine creativity in 6 months of speaking to fewer marketing people than ever before.
So hypothesis #2 – the frame of driving growth in our jobs has restricted marketing people’s creativity to such an extent that we’re no longer capable of providing the answers, even if people were able to hear them from us.