Will marketers have a new reality too?

October 9, 2009  |  by Kent Stones

I recently read an advice column by Carolyn Hax (yeah, I know) that contained a remarkable suggestion. The subject had cheated on his girlfriend, yet through hard work regained her trust to a point where she accepted his marriage proposal. His conundrum? He still had thoughts about the “other woman.” The line in Carolyn's response that caught my attention was, “The biggest idiot move was jumping from the cheating stage to the winning-your-girlfriend-back stage - bypassing entirely the introspection stage, where one figures out why one cheated in the first place.”  This hit home with me because I’ve been struggling lately with what is going to happen as the economy recovers. I’m reading articles about the “new reality” and news reports on the “greatest fundamental economic and societal change since the Great Depression.” I feel we as marketers are at that “introspection” point. We’re poised to dive back into the thrilling world of marketing (with budgets!) in a recovering economy. But have we appropriately reflected about what got us here, what we’re doing as a profession, and why?

Have We Changed? Should We Change?
I love understanding people. It’s why I love my job, which is understanding how people make choices in the context of the cultures in which they live. I’ve discovered one thing about our human nature: we all have great intentions but poor execution. Permanently changing a bad habit requires hard work over a long period of time and a tremendous amount of support. Anyone who has lost a lot of weight will tell you at some point along the way they felt like they earned an indulgence. They may put a few pounds back on, but hey, they were still way under where they were. Over time, most put back on the weight they lost. Few truly make the lifestyle change that keeps it off and it is a long, arduous journey. Probably one of many before it stuck. I feel like we’re in that same place as marketers.

We’ve gone through an extremely traumatic, disconcerting time. Consumer spending got out of balance and it caught up to us. Frankly, I believe we marketers share some responsibility in this. Prior to the recession, we were focused on encouraging people to buy, oftentimes with little regard to whether they could afford to or not. In our culture of self-reliance and belief in caveat emptor, it wasn’t our responsibility. Consumers were responsible for making informed decisions and our job was to connect products and services to those who wanted them. But we’ve learned consumers didn’t make informed decisions and often didn’t have the knowledge or expertise to be able to make sound judgments about many things, which led us to our current situation.

As consumers rebalanced and companies repaired their balance sheets, marketers survived on slashed budgets and worked hard to generate results despite reduced purchasing. In other words, we had to change our marketing “lifestyle.” And one could argue that these changes were healthy; they forced us to get to what works and jettison anything that didn't. Now, as things start to slowly improve, will we fall back into the same old patterns of finding ways to encourage people to buy, regardless of whether they should? In the financial world, someone signing up for a brokerage account must pass a suitability test to ensure they have a minimum level of knowledge before undertaking what could be a very risky proposition. What are we, as marketers, doing to make certain that people who buy our wares are suitable? 

Consider the Return On Social Investment
I recently had the privilege of meeting Wallace Meyers, the Director of a KU School of Business program that focuses on helping underserved areas of Kansas get access to the same kind of thinking that larger companies or larger areas can hire. That’s all well and good, but what I found interesting is how they select projects. When examining prospective work, they weigh the economic, social and educational ROI for an area. It isn’t about just making more money, it’s about improving the lives of Kansans by helping companies grow so they can hire more highly skilled people. I love this. What if we began presenting a different ROI when presenting our marketing plans to management? While demonstrating the return on capital from investing in a product or business, we could also show the social return by demonstrating how communities might benefit: increases in employment that might occur; health changes or psychological impacts of our efforts, etc. And let’s not forget the knowledge return. How does our proposal influence the education achievement in an area? What new skills are developed in the work force?  Maybe, just maybe, we’d start selling products or services based on their true return rather than just on how much money they make. That, in my opinion, is what free markets are supposed to do.

On a whim, I went out to the AMA to read their definition of marketing, expecting to find a profit-focused definition along the lines of “persuasion” or “satisfying consumer needs” or “fulfilling market wants.”  Imagine how delighted I was to find the following: the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. Beautiful. At this economic cross-roads, it is my hope that we marketers will take Carolyn’s advice and not skip the introspection stage. Rather than falling into old habits of doing what it takes to just deliver the numbers, let’s become the support system for consumers who may fall off the wagon every once in awhile but, with our help, will be able to pick themselves up and restore their sense of balance.