Redefining Marketing #2: The Magic of Multisolving

What can we learn from activism, philosophy, psychology, law, anthropology, and economics?

Other disciplines are modernizing, sometimes radicalizing.

Redefining Marketing #1 Put Technology on Trial demonstrates the negative impact of dominant digital platforms on marketing and advertising.? Big Tech became an intermediary, erecting a gate between companies and their customers, and extracting rents for access. Innovation has been suppressed, and once valuable and valued brands destroyed.

An infuriating aspect of marketing and advertising is the narrowness of our perspective and analysis.? Here are six people who write about us from different domains.

Why is this worth your time?? Because it’s a gift to learn how other professions see us, as Scotland’s national poet reminds us: “Oh would some power the gift gives us, to see ourselves as others see us!”

My descriptions here do not do justice to the research of these six and the richness of their work.

Cory Doctorow is an activist and author writing about the digital economy, creative business, privacy and the law, most recently in Chokepoint Capitalism (with Rebecca Giblin) and The Internet Con; relevant as AI takes the threat to creativity and innovation to new levels.

David Runciman is a philosopher asking in new book The Handover whether we have given control of our lives to corporations and governments, and what can be done; relevant as Marketing has already handed over communication and commerce to Big Tech’s algorithms.

Jamie Susskind is a lawyer exploring in The Digital Republic how we can get the digital platforms out of our democracy and institutions around the world: relevant as Marketing’s institutions surrendered to Big Tech years ago.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist researching in The Righteous Mind, and newsletter After Babel, morality, humans’ innate capacity to be "groupish" rather than "selfish", and teen mental health; relevant as his latest work explains how AI is about to make social media more toxic.

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist writing in Less is More about the relentless pursuit of growth as measured by GDP, the “fantasy” of green growth, and what de-growth means; relevant as marketers today explore how to reconcile corporate goals with people's evolving awareness and expectations.

Kate Raworth is an economist setting out in Doughnut Economics “A Safe and Just Space for Humanity” and working with communities globally through her Action Lab; relevant as a model that accounts for a “triple bottom line” of profit, people (social) and planet (environmental) goals.

Yet it seems marketing strategies are conceived, and advertising campaigns executed, in a self-contained world.? Economics, society, environment, employment, and the law are never integrated, and rarely considered. In 1960 Theodore Levitt called this Marketing Myopia.

Over the last 40 years the industry has become ever more self-absorbed, negligent, and (apparently) ignorant of the damage to society to which it has contributed. If this seems an overstatement, please see Targeted ads exploded, and the damage has been devastating.

Over the last 20 years perspective narrowed further. A paper in the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), co-authored by N Craig Smith, INSEAD’s Chaired Professor of Ethics and Social Responsibility, identified The New Marketing Myopia as “1) a single-minded focus on the customer to the exclusion of other stakeholders; 2) an overly narrow definition of the customer and his/her needs; and 3) a failure to recognize the changed societal context of business that necessitates addressing multiple stakeholders.”

1. The narrow focus on the customer is most evident in the case of Amazon, the bellwether big tech giant. It claims to prioritize low prices for customers while abusing its employees and contractors. The truth is now being revealed as FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power. That power is further exploited through Amazon Ads, enthusiastically embraced by the ad industry and adtech.
2. The narrow definition of the customer’s needs has been explained in terms of low prices, while the FTC confirms what marketers have long known, that Amazon in fact prevented companies from competing on price, using its algorithm Project Nessie to do so, and demonstrably raising prices in categories of its choosing. Grace Kite, one of the few econometricians working in marketing, is one of the few to study price. (We knew Nessie was a monster but loved her as a myth. With lochs, mountains, golf, and whisky, she brought the world to Scotland. What idiot abused her name?)
3. The narrow and singular metric for business performance over 40 years has been shareholder value. For Amazon no-one really matters, not employees (including contractors) nor customers nor advertisers. Everywhere, marketers have followed the herd in basing everything on selling more and increasing shareholder value.

Marketing is trapped in a dominant narrative created and sustained by an older generation of economists, psychologists, and anthropologists; what in a rare admission in a mainstream marketing publication Andrew Tenzer called Marketing's individualistic neoliberal worldview.

Amazon is the extreme case of how to leverage financial and technological transformation for unprecedented growth and power. Invest when money is cheap. Promise growth not profits. Minimize tax. Exploit workers. Ignore laws. Put competition out of business or acquire it. Collude illegally. Use M&A to monopolize and/or financialize every part of the economy.

Then raise prices. Ignore or obfuscate societal and environmental externalities.

I cite Amazon as a case. Simultaneously, FTC investigates Google Search, with the extent of Apple’s collusion in maintaining Google’s monopoly revealed ($18-20 billion annually), Meanwhile Microsoft is trying to get out of paying its massive tax bill ($29 billion).

These four are by far the biggest companies by capitalization in the world. Nothing else come close They lead the "winner takes all" world of Big Everything: Tech, Pharma, Oil, Retail, and Auto etc. We have been watching Big Everything takeover the rest of the world. That includes marketing and advertising, where they are enabled in achieving the specific goal of controlling the dominant narrative.

I wrote in 2019 about the Destruction of Brand Value by Big Tech since 2000, then updated the analysis of the Top 20 brands in Redefining Marketing #1 Put Technology On Trial. It is chilling to realize that it is impossible now to conceive of the top 20, or even the top 50, enterprises failing; or of brands outside the top of the table breaking through.

It is equally unthinkable to conceive of marketing and advertising regaining the dynamic and creative role it once enjoyed in building brands in competitive markets, and in anticipating and meeting the evolving needs of new generations of consumers, employees, communities, and citizens.

Or is it?

If we want to understand what might be done, we will need a consilience, a unity of knowledge. We will need a process for teamworking with scholars and practitioners from the domains of activism, philosophy, psychology, law, anthropology, and economics.

The Magic of Multisolving is a paper recently published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Author Elizabeth Sawin says of this growing movement: “When people work together across domains to address multiple problems with one policy or investment, they are multisolving.” Sawin herself applies system dynamics and computer simulations to the multiple problems caused by changing climate. Her paper introduces the steps in a teamworking process,

We urgently need a systems approach to marketing and advertising.? We urgently need analytics and modeling in marketing and advertising to expand their scope and ambition. We urgently need to start multisolving.?

Stewart Pearson

Stewart believes in Consilience, the unity of knowledge across disciplines. He has lived, worked, and traveled globally in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. He has settled in the Evergreen State and Seattle. After studying Statistics and Marxist Economics in the U.K. he had four decades of experience in marketing and advertising focused on building client brands directly and globally.?He was Global Chief Client Officer and Vice-Chairman of Wunderman, then the fastest-growing major agency in WPP. David Ogilvy once sent him a telex from India and Lester Wunderman told him stories of Picasso from the village in France where both of Stewart’s heroes had lived. Stewart is on?LinkedIn?and?Twitter, and at?[email protected].