How to improve the reputation of marketing

The CIM | The Chartered Institute of Marketing has kindly asked me to contribute my thoughts on how to improve the reputation of marketing at their annual CMO event which will take place at Henley School of Management.?

Our capacity to tell ourselves stories of what better can look like is our greatest gift as humans. It is why unlike other species we haven’t just evolved but have developed from generation to generation.?

While this has given us the lives we lead, we are now in a period where the downside of our own actions and their mostly unintended consequences is driving a serious risk to our shared future.?We face a man-made climate emergency, the collapse of nature’s most important systems, untenable levels of inequalities and the rising challenges and threat multipliers that are emerging from these problems in a world of powerful new technologies.?

Unless we can turn this around, our human cognition and its unique gift for transformative storytelling may have become maladaptive. And we may even be losing ownership of our stories to technologies that increasingly shape our stories in ways we cannot fully comprehend.??

Marketing is the professional home of stories that mobilise change. It may be concerning and revealing if not entirely unsurprising therefore that even a champion of marketing such as Philip Kotler has called for a period of ‘de-marketing’, undoing the damage we have certainly albeit accidentally caused and making marketing regenerative.??

I certainly believe we need to think in terms of a post-consumer marketing that shifts from manufacturing desires and ‘making the attractive necessary’ to meeting real needs and ‘making the necessary attractive’, modelling new social and economic norms that expand rather than diminish human flourishing for the long-term and help us address rather than worsen the deepest problems we face.?

So as part of my prep for the conference, here is my draft ten-point manifesto not to cancel marketing but instead to change it for the better so that in turn it can change our human story for good.?

1. Think contribution first, reputation second. When people ask me how to build trust, my advice is always to begin instead by aiming to become more trustworthy. Accustomed as I am to challenging any brief I’m given, my first thought is therefore to move the discussion away from improving the reputation of marketing to first improving the contribution marketing makes, letting its reputation rise accordingly. By understanding our stakeholders, we as marketers can shift the organisations we work with towards a ‘contribution orientation’ that prioritises sustainably making a net positive contribution to people’s lives and livelihoods. Research shows that if we create more stakeholder value as our primary goal then we tend to end up capturing more value as profit than if we made profit our primary purpose. This is because we spot more ways to be useful to the people we need by actively seeking to serve them. Ensuring we are a net positive contributor to our stakeholders and society also makes our work more rewarding.?

2. Be the best friend we wish we had. We must shift upstream from understanding human choice to understanding human need.? How can we make sure not only that our customers choose us but that it is in their interests to do so? And not only in their interests but compatible with the needs and resilience of the communities in which they live. When a major business such as Nestlé admits that 56% of the food it produces is unhealthy, marketing has gone seriously wrong.?

3. Expand the problem set. We can do almost nothing alone. I can type this post, but I have no idea how the packets of information I create make their way to your screen. Almost all of life depends on a complex web of cooperation. Any problem in business, or in society for that matter is almost always most fundamentally a problem of human co-operation. This makes it a marketing brief in disguise. So, let’s not limit ourselves to our current job descriptions. It’s time to let marketing loose on the biggest problems we face within, across and beyond the organisations we work with.?

4. Extend our timeline. One of our guests at MarketingKind wrote an essay called Earthquake 2051, exploring how the humanitarian action of the future might be conceptualised, funded and delivered through greater mutualism. Exploring the deep future is often less about prediction than it is about asking how we could solve the problems we currently think should be addressed but which we overlook because we believe they may be just too difficult. So, let’s think through what marketing should look like in 2051 – not for the benefit of the future but for the change it can reveal that we can begin to action now.?

5. Shorten our timeline. We can also benefit from shrinking our focus to the absolute present. How can we make a marketer of everyone in our organisation (or even of everyone whom our organisations reaches). What is the story we’d really like people to tell right now about their contact with our train managers? With our front desks? With our police officers? Or with our call centres? Detail is what we most remember. And detail usually costs more brainpower than budget, so we have no excuse but to own our outcomes.?

6. Make our customers the heroes. In creative writing, an early lesson is to describe our villains as people who do not see themselves as the bad guys, but rather as the heroes of their own stories. I hope no marketer sees their customers as villains, but we do reduce them to the role of ‘consumers’ as if they are simply waiting for us to save the day by pouring our magnificence into them. Wrong. Our customers are doing everything they can to improve their own lives – we are just here to find a way to become a part of their stories by making it a bit easier, more satisfying or perhaps even more magical for them to do that.?

7. Bring all our stakeholders with us. When I got into marketing, one of the biggest opportunities of the profession might have been to run a Superbowl ad. Today, the challenge instead is to knit together complex systems that span the participation of all our stakeholders. How can we work together to make the future of our sector, our city, or for that matter our profession truly sustainable and regenerative? What does this mean for the stories we need to lean into to make that work for everyone whom we depend upon? How does our latest innovation benefit suppliers? Distributors? Partners? Communities? And investors? The Eden Project in Cornwall does not just track its revenues, but also the value of the tourism that it brings to the region, which now stands at over ￡2.2 billion. Now that’s a story for a whole region to buy into.

8. Do not worship false metrics. The very existence of a metric can be distorting. When I took up jogging, I naturally monitored my distance and speed, and gradually realised I could run 10k, 15K, then a half-marathon. But actually, what my body needed after a certain point was not yet more steps on concrete, but the greater variety of weight training and more diverse movement. When we choose a metric we optimise for that metric – so let’s make sure we choose wisely and actively investigate for a potential shadow-side to any measures we choose.?

9. Overcome our Stockholm syndrome. The first order of good relations with finance and technology is to understand and meet the needs of finance and to comprehend and work with the opportunities of technology.? But there is a higher order of responsibility which comes not just from appeasing finance and trying to keep pace with technology but from taking ownership of the bigger picture from which we derive our financial targets and establish our priorities for technology in the first place. Our most problems are even more fundamentally problems of human cooperation than they are of technology and finance.? A business with poor financials but the love and trust of its stakeholders may have a future. A profitable business that has lost the goodwill of the people it serves and on whom it depends will not. When technology serves humans, it can transform lives for the better. When humans serve technology, it can lead to poor mental health, the breakdown of society and the polarisation of democracy.?

10. Awaken the lion. In an old-fashioned circus lion-taming act, the tamer knows the lion is more powerful than he is; the audience knows it; but the lion does not. Capitalism is a story. Democracy is a story. Progress is a story. If we are to build a sustainable economy through purposeful enterprise, we need to get our stories right. It is time to awaken the lion of marketing.

By adopting this approach, I believe we can as a profession lead our organisations in making a contribution to human lives for the betterment of all our stakeholders. Our reputation may then take care of itself.

Let me know your own thoughts. And is any of this resonates with you, you can always find a safe space to develop these capabilities with supportive peers at MarketingKind .