Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’
Marketing for a sustainable future
Those of you who’ve visited this blog before may see a slight change in emphasis in future posts. I’ll be exploring more frequently the personal and professional interest I have in marketing’s role in a sustainable future. Some would say marketing is antithetical to sustainability. As a long-time marketer, I don’t believe that. However, I also know that marketers shoulder great responsibility for supporting companies, products and business practices that are fundamentally unsustainable.
I don’t believe marketing, by definition, is the problem. One marketing executive I know believes in the Peter Drucker objective of marketing: to create and keep a customer. Sounds simple enough. And non-controversial. It says nothing about creating demand for material products we don’t need and end up throwing away in gigantic landfills. Nor supporting businesses that indulge in wasteful and polluting manufacturing practices. Nor ignoring an economic system that places shareholder interests far above those of the environment and the larger human community.
As marketers, we have choices in who, what and how we market. We can create awareness, build preference and generate demand for organizations and products that do good, or at least no harm. Or we can put our talents in creativity and persuasion to work for the bad guys. I believe it’s time for marketers to awaken to our capacity to change the world for the better and to make conscious choices about how we are going to employ our skills and ourselves.
There are organizations and businesses trying to do the right thing for shareholders, customers, employees, communities and the environment. These are the employers and clients we need to be supporting. If that isn’t a practical option for you as a marketer (since you need a job and income), then do what you can to change the marketing — if not the behavior — of your employer or client. Stand for sustainability, even if you stand alone.
For better or worse, marketers are perhaps the most visible storytellers of our time. The stories we craft and publicize are meant to move people to act, and very often they do. The question we must face is whether the actions we instigate support or jeopardize a sustainable future. If you don’t know the answer, then consider the physician’s maxim: First, do no harm.
Tags: do no harm, Marketing, storytellers, Sustainability, sustainable future
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The ‘ism’ that rules America
Got a book you must read if, like me, you’re wondering how it is consumption came to rule our lives. Check out “An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America,” by Gary Cross, a history professor at Penn State. It isn’t exactly hot off the presses, having been published in 2000. But it’s no less relevant now, as the urgency to build a more sustainable economy grows each day.
As a long-time marketer (previously in high tech), I’m well aware that marketing, advertising, public relations and the like are big reasons why, in Cross’ words, “Consumerism was the ‘ism’ that won” in the 20th Century. But, as Cross shows, it was hardly just the power of advertising that explains why this ism prevailed.
“Consumerism,” he writes, “succeeded where other ideologies failed because it concretely expressed the cardinal political ideals of the century — liberty and democracy — and with relatively little self-destructive behavior or personal humiliation.”
Cross considers consumerism one of the “meaning systems for human life.” Among his keen observations is that 20th Century critics of mass consumption on the Left and the Right failed equally to create credible alternatives. Those on the Left who advocated simple living and downscaling “all too readily ignored the deep psychological and cultural meanings of goods.” Their counterparts on the Right, meanwhile, decried the threat to “family values” by an overly permissive consumer culture. And yet they also stood with conservative politicians (most importantly Reagan) who worshipped the free market and tore down “the walls that held back the market from seeping into every corner of the American psyche and society.”
Unlike many writers of history who would let the facts speak for themselves, Cross couldn’t resist closing with a chapter on the need to confront the social costs of unleashed consumption. He calls on the Left and Right to find common ground. “A society that reduces everything to a market inevitably divides those who can buy from those who cannot, undermining any sense of collective responsibility and with it, democracy.”
Consumerism has provided meaning for Americans unlike any other alternative system. Cross isn’t optimistic we can replace it anytime soon. Americans, he said, perfected 20th Century consumerism. Now we have to figure out ways to control it.
Tags: An All-Consuming Century, Gary Cross, history of consumerism, Marketing, meaning system, sustainable economy
Posted in Books, Business & Economics, Consumerism, Marketing, Sustainability | No Comments »