Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Marketers’ choice: ‘Lead, follow, or get out of the way’
Consumer spending is falling fast. While that’s bad for the economy, it’s good for the environment. Excessive consumption produces waste and pollution streams that are destroying our planet. The question now is how are we going to respond to the economic crisis at hand. If our elected officials and business leaders seize the moment, the consumption downturn will ignite a movement that saves our economy and our environment for generations to come.
And maybe, just maybe we marketers will heed the call to help lead the way.
In the near term, an environmental benefit will be of little solace to those whose jobs depend on consumer spending, which is to say most of us since consumer spending comprises nearly two-thirds of our economy. It’s all-but certain the current financial crisis will slip into an economic recession, perhaps as rough as any we’ve experienced in decades.
As painful as the near future may become, the glass half-full view reveals the opportunity ahead. Financier George Soros explains:
You see, for the last 25 years the world economy, the motor of the world economy that has been driving it was consumption by the American consumer who has been spending more than he has been saving, all right? Than he’s been producing. So that motor is now switched off. It’s finished…You need a new motor. And we have a big problem. Global warming. It requires big investment. And that could be the motor of the world economy in the years to come.
Over consumption, made possible by easy access to debt, explains much of the financial mess we’re in today. And a consumer economy, stoked by cheap, abundant fossil fuels, is a principle cause of global warming. In the end, reliance on consumer spending is both bad for the economy and bad for the environment. Other than that, it’s great.
What makes the coming elections so critical is the next president and Congress will decide whether we as a nation will fundamentally change the underpinnings of our economy. If we simply find new ways to prop up our consumption-based economy, we will hasten the day of reckoning that climate change requires. If we embrace the environmental and social challenges of climate change as the economic opportunity of our times, we can all look toward the future with hope.
For marketers, the opportunity is to finally begin leading the world in the right direction. If “the motor of the world economy” has been consumption, the fuel has been marketing. Marketers create awareness and demand for goods, services and ideas. The problem is we’ve used our talents overwhelmingly in support of unsustainable economies, employers and clients.
But that can change. Imagine if we were to unleash our creativity and persuasive abilities in service to freeing our economy from dependence on fossil fuels and mindless consumption. I’m convinced the impact would be both enormous and swift for our climate, environment and economy.
I don’t know whether the collective parts of the marketing industry — branding, advertising, PR, direct marketing etc. — are up to the task. The industry is so deeply enmeshed in the profitable, but dead-end ways of consumerism. So be it. The train is leaving with or without us. In the words of Thomas Paine, our choice is simple: “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”
Post-Katrina: Putting the human back in marketing
As I get ready for my summer vacation in the Northwest, my thoughts are in the South, specifically New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. That area is about to mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. No doubt residents fortunate enough to have homes and jobs and politicians and government officials charged with the region’s recovery will cite the many signs of progress. Others, with equal claim, will point to the vast stretches that have yet to recover, looking virtually as they did when the floodwaters receded.
My reflection is of a different sort. I only experienced the storm and its catastrophic aftermath through the media. A year after Katrina hit, I traveled along the Gulf Coast and into New Orleans. I needed to see with my own eyes what had happened. I returned to New Orleans a few months later as part of a volunteer crew that gutted and cleaned homes for a week. Needless to say, what I saw with my own eyes has left a lasting impression.
I realize now that Katrina is as responsible as anything for the shift I made in my work. I had spent 20 years in high tech marketing and was running the PR and advertising agency I co-founded in 1993 when all hell broke loose in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The storm and a tragically flawed response at all levels of government laid bare for the entire world to see the outrageous inequities and injustices that remain in our land of the free and home of the brave.
By coincidence, I departed my previous business and the high tech industry a year after Katrina hit. I had decided I needed to shift what I knew how to do — branding, marketing, communications — in support of businesses and organizations whose values and actions are making the world a better place. When I formed a new firm to work at the crossroads of sustainability and marketing, I wasn’t seeing sustainability through the single lens of saving the environment. As much as we humans have disregarded and damaged our natural world, we have caused no less harm to each other. Katrina was simply the most recent evidence.
Efforts to create a sustainable future must treat the Earth and all of its inhabitants as one. Sustainability isn’t saving the old growth in the Pacific Northwest forests and ignoring the rights of all humans to have their basic needs met and to live in peace. By this standard, green marketing falls short. Its preoccupation with promoting eco-friendly products is often little more than dressing up unsustainable consumption in a different color. Even more significantly, green marketing doesn’t go far enough to address the broader human and social dimensions of sustainability. If you’re a retailer touting your green product lines while paying employees low wages and no benefits, you fail the sustainability test.
Management guru Peter Drucker said the function of marketing is to create and keep a customer. In this post-Katrina world, maybe it’s worth remembering that customers are humans first. Forget that, and one day marketers will have no customers to keep.
Why marketing dashboards don’t measure up
I get invitations to attend workshops all the time. Usually, I gloss over them. But I stopped on one the other day called “Marketing Metrics and Dashboards 2.0.” Not exactly a topic I’ve been dying to learn about. But it got me thinking: There must be a business opportunity for someone willing and able to show how best to integrate “triple bottom line” metrics into marketing.
Marketing dashboards have come into vogue in recent years, although they are not in broad use because they are complex and expensive to create and maintain. They seem to have found a niche primarily among large companies whose marketing departments are under scrutiny by CEOs and CFOs to demonstrate their expenditures are adding to the bottom line — the profit bottom line, that is. The marketing firm that is leading the workshop focuses on helping its clients “determine the financial return from marketing investments.” Their tagline is: “Measure What You Should, Not Just What You Can.”
That begs the question: What “should” marketers be measuring? In recent years, marketers have been under increasing pressure to prove a positive financial impact from their programs. Dashboards are touted as one mechanism for doing so. I’m all for marketing carrying its weight financially. I also believe the possibilities, if not the responsibilities, of marketing go well beyond its impact on sales and profits.
Companies committed to sustainable business practices recognize their success can’t be achieved simply by maximizing profits. They understand that profits gained at the expense of the environment or stakeholders, such as employees, suppliers and communities, are to be avoided and indeed are not a measurement of success at all. The triple-bottom-line approach of balancing profits with people and planet acts as a check on ill-gotten financial returns.
Which brings us back to marketing measurements. I would expect companies professing a commitment to the environment and the fair treatment of all stakeholders would also ensure this commitment is reflected in how they conduct and evaluate marketing. If marketing is held to a standard of financial ROI only — even as difficult as that is to measure — there will be no incentive for marketers to sweat the social and environmental impacts (positive or negative) of their work.
Marketers can perform a vital sustainability function by understanding, monitoring and influencing how their employers or clients create and manage their supply chains, conduct fair trade practices, manufacture their products, dispose of their waste, deliver their services and encourage recycling and reuse. This should be what it means to take responsibility for what you’re marketing.
Companies fixated on the financial bottom line are telling marketers to ignore this function and putting them in position to build customer demand for unsustainable products and services. But marketers are not simply victims here. They have a choice: keep playing the game, try changing the rules in favor of sustainability or look for a new employer or client.
A marketing program devoted to sustainability would adopt and track metrics that demonstrate how and how well marketing is contributing to the financial health of its employer or client, the well-being of people the company interacts with and the protection of the environment. I know this is asking a tremendous amount from marketers, not least of which is to define the non-financial metrics to be used.
At this point, I’d be happy getting more people in business to agree the value of marketing shouldn’t be measured in dollars and cents alone. Anybody building a triple-bottom-line dashboard?
Greening junk mail? Start with junk being marketed
A group calling itself the Green Marketing Coalition is trying to produce best-practices guidelines for the direct mail business. That would be the “junk mail” business to most of us. “So far the coalition’s guidelines are long on earnestness and short on truly new ideas,” the New York Times concludes. The paper quotes one head of a nonprofit dedicated to protecting forests:
“It’s hard to argue against any well-intentioned effort to use more recycled paper, but the idea of greening junk mail is still a bit like putting lipstick on a pig.”
Ouch. I suppose the direct mail business earned that swipe. I hate junk mail as much as the next person. But not all direct mail is junk. It’s the rare individual who never responds to a single direct mailer. A generally acceptable response rate to a mailer is about 2%. That means most mailers are not junk to 2% of us. Believe it or not, that’s usually enough of a response for businesses or other organizations, including nonprofits, to keep stuffing our mail boxes.
The Green Marketing Coalition, which got its start in Seattle, is made up of both direct marketing businesses and their corporate clients. Their guidelines are aimed at reducing the environmental impact of direct mail. It’s easy to scoff at their efforts, like the nonprofit executive director quoted here. Many believe direct mail is fundamentally unsustainable, given its waste of paper and the energy used in the production, distribution and disposal of materials that so frequently get ignored by its target audience.
But direct mail continues to be used because it can be, and often is, an effective marketing tool. We probably all know admirable environmental nonprofits that are among the legions of direct mail marketers. As a former co-owner of a marketing agency that offered direct marketing among its services, I would urge organizations to move completely to electronic mail as soon as possible. Although most of us hate junk email as much as junk paper mail, at least it’s more eco-friendly.
One reason companies don’t resort to email exclusively is the anti-SPAM laws that restrict the use of commercial email to opt-in subscribers only. Traditional postal mail has no such restrictions. It’s easy to buy a postal mail list and send away. The environmentally responsible thing to do is use postal mail only when there is no alternative, such as when you’re just starting to create an opt-in email list or your target audience doesn’t have email access. Those are not problems for most major companies or organizations today.
If direct marketers really wanted to make a difference, they wouldn’t promote products or services that are not sustainably made or delivered. Period. The junk goods and services purchased as a result of successful direct mail do far greater environmental harm than junk mail itself.
I don’t think you’ll be hearing that conversation among members of the Green Marketing Coalition anytime soon.