How not to be evil in 2022

Anyone who stayed in business through 2021 has a lot to say about it. But I think if there’s one thing we’ve learned this year, it’s that predictions are almost pointless. Looking back on this year and looking ahead to the next, our challenge as business leaders isn’t to make predictions but to work from principals that help us meet whatever the future holds.?

2021 was a year of extremes and contrast in the business world: extreme consumer demand contrasted with an extreme shortage of consumer goods and extreme supply issues.?Extreme polarization and division in politics at a time when we face an extreme need to work together on important issues. Extreme fear and uncertainty contrasted with extreme confidence in the market that didn’t always align with the mood of the times.?

This year, I started sharing my thoughts about marketing and how marketers can effect positive change. As the year draws to a close, I’m looking back over my notes in light of the year’s events. Here are my thoughts for the end of the year and a few suggestions for how we marketers can do good work and be a force for good in 2022.

Too often, “thought leadership” posts only add to the noise by trying to win readers over to one extreme or another rather than offering nuance and some perspective on the debate. So, as I write this post, I want to be careful not to tell you what to think, but to encourage you to ask the right questions: about business, about marketing, but at a deeper level, about what it means to do marketing in a time when we are facing much more pressing issues than the need to promote our businesses and products.?

“Just marketing” doesn’t work anymore.

Customers demand substance from the brands they support, and now more than ever, dishonest marketing will get called out. Marketers used to be able to get away with talking at people about products–loudly proclaiming, “my crap is better than my competitor’s crap!”?

Consumers today are too wise for that approach, and they’re sick of it. They’re well aware when a message is “just marketing.” Younger generations are especially hard to fool in this regard. Not only do they know nonsense marketing when they see it, but they can always tell when a company is being insincere in their messaging, especially on important issues like the environment or civil rights.?

There really is nowhere to hide for superficial marketing in 2022. The costs of nonsense are just too high, and it’s too easy to get called out. But make no mistake, this is a good thing! Marketers now have to focus on doing the right things rather than just saying the right things.?

How marketing became “evil…”

“Evil” might sound like a pretty judgemental word, the kind of imprecise generalization we in marketing should steer clear of. But the term “evil marketing” has a very specific meaning. It’s that “just marketing” phenomenon that has dominated advertising for most of the past hundred years.?

I encountered the term “evil marketing” in March of this year when I attended a virtual conference hosted by Frédéric Dalsace for IMD Business School on sustainability and the future of marketing. In a webinar on sustainability and the future of marketing, we looked at the history of marketing and how marketing became “evil,” as IMD marketing professor Frédéric Dalsace calls it.?

The origin of problematic marketing is interesting and surprising. It starts with the railroads, over 150 years ago. As trains connected cities and reduced travel times, addressable markets became larger. Marketing co-evolved with supply chain developments to sell new things to new customers. This, in and of itself, wasn’t anything sinister. But it was the beginning of a cycle that would eventually spin out of control.?

In the 1950s, the invention of the land/sea shipping container expanded the global market virtually overnight. It wasn’t long before marketing caught up to this “new normal” in which businesses could sell anything anywhere thanks to low shipping costs. Again, this leap in technology and supply-chain efficiency wasn’t bad in and of itself.?

What Dalsace calls the “evil moment of marketing” came when marketing became uncoupled, in his words, from the economics of supply. It had become possible to sell an almost infinite amount of anything to anyone anywhere at a very low cost. Shipping became “So cheap that it was almost immaterial,” as?David Kerstens, a banker, told The Economist. Marketers ran with this and gave us fast fashion, cheap, flat-packed furniture, and other unsustainable wonders.?

Until recently, the job of marketers was to convince people that they always needed more. But in 2021, “more” is canceled! Unsustainable practices are no longer tolerated by many consumers–especially in the young demographics marketers depend on for growth. On top of that, this was the year we saw that we could no longer take seamless supply chains for granted.?

The year the ship got stuck…

2021 was the year many of us thought about container ships for the first time. As with so many modern technologies, advanced supply chains aren’t something you notice until something goes wrong. And as with any complex system, a small problem can have a disastrous ripple effect that impacts the whole system.

In March, shortly after the IMD conference, the container ship EVER GIVEN got stuck in the Suez Canal for almost a week. Ships all over the world had to change course, goods were stuck in transit, memes were made mocking the incident, and we all suddenly realized how much the global economy depends on a 200-meter wide ditch in the Middle East.?

Meanwhile, this year also marked an unprecedented leap in the cost of shipping a container. According to The Economist, shipping a standard 40-foot container from Shanghai to New York would have cost around $2,500 in 2019. As of September 2021, that figure is closer to $15,000, or $20,000 on short notice!?

This shift will have far-reaching implications across many industries. But for marketers, it’s a wake-up call at a time when we desperately need one. Not only is the “more-based” model totally unsustainable and detrimental to our planet, but it’s also not even working the way it used to.?

What’s next is anybody’s guess, but marketers have to be a part of shaping better alternatives in the new year and beyond.?

The opposite of evil is relevance.?

So what is the opposite of “evil” marketing? How do we, as marketers, do our job if more more more is no longer an ethical or popular strategy??

I don’t think we have to choose between doing the right thing for the planet and doing good marketing. This is where we get back to the idea of authenticity and having nowhere to hide. “Evil” is a broken style of marketing, and customers today are well aware when a brand is just saying the right thing instead of acting with real values.?

There’s no denying that marketing helped create the current sustainability crisis. We wouldn’t be choking our planet with more if clever marketers hadn’t spent decades convincing us that stuff was the answer to all our problems. But I believe that marketing can be a solution to the problems marketing has created.?

The opposite of “evil” marketing is relevant marketing—customer centricity. To achieve relevance in 2022, it won’t be enough to just say things that sound relevant to your customers and make the right noises.

Relevance will have to be demonstrated through action that earns trust and attention.?

2022 is the year to be real!?

Happy holidays and a healthy 2022 to all of you!