Marketing is now not just about marketing?

The sand under the world of marketing is shifting.

No longer can companies use marketing just to boost revenues and profits; creating social impact is vital too. This is one of the key messages that I took away from a January 30, 2021, Forbes article titled <The Future of Marketing: Insight From 5 Tech CMOs>[i]. The article is attributed to Kimberly A. Whitler.

In the Forbes article, Seema Kumar (CMO, ServiceChannel) says that “As Millennials and Gen Z, who care deeply about social and environmental issues, become a demographic with real purchasing power, marketers will need to guide their companies to determine the issues they care about and can be truly committed to. Brands increasingly wield influence — expect to see more and more of them using that power for the good of society and not just more profit."[ii]

This means that marketing is getting closely aligned to the concept of sustainability and the Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) framework. An article from the May–June 2020 edition of the Harvard Business Review captured this mood well with the headline ‘Marketing Meets Mission’.[iii] The article laid the case for why today a brand needs to connect a purpose to the business and, subsequently, enhance the company’s social impact.

Marketing is no more just about boosting profits. It is about projecting how a company can be a force for good in the larger community of the human family. Sample this from afore mentioned HBR article[iv]: “Consider Knorr, a €3 billion Unilever brand that includes bouillon cubes, a century-old product line with a large global market. As part of a broad push to address malnutrition, Knorr identified iron-deficiency anemia as a serious health threat in developing countries, particularly for young women. Focusing first on Nigeria, where nearly half of reproductive-age women suffer from anemia, Knorr developed a new iron-fortified bouillon product and launched a campaign encouraging women and teenage girls to add it and iron-rich leafy green vegetables to stews.”

Marketing is now not just about marketing. Marketing for profit alone is on the way out; marketing for impact is the emerging social vogue. It is now increasingly about being part of the solution in terms of facing down issues confronting the greater human family!

REFERENCES:

[i] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2021/01/30/the-future-of-marketing-insight-from-5-tech-cmos/?sh=4817aaca7035

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] https://hbr.org/2020/05/marketing-meets-mission

[iv] Ibid.