Good Marketing

Surprisingly, in a world of over-consumption, us marketeers do have a role to play.

I have resolved one specific paradox and I’d like to share with you how I got there.

My craft, and the craft of those we work with, is about helping companies and organisations promote themselves and their products. We are a marketing company and I am a marketer. But marketing is a bad thing because it promotes consumption and a host of other things which are bad.

So the paradox is how can I work hard at supporting the UN SDGs while at the same time being a marketer?

First, I need to establish my own sweet and innocent view of what marketing is, because I have no doubt that I define my work in a very idealistic way, and I kinda need you to empathise with that idealism first if possible.

My very first job out of a Physics degree was as a technical writer at a marketing agency explaining semiconductors in articles. I didn’t know how much I actually loved learning things and explaining them until I started that job. I was repeatedly and indescribably overexcited by being able to evangelise amazing new bits of technology to as large an audience as possible every week. This was me - I had found myself in these acts of evangelism.

Within a month, carried away by the euphoria of explaining complex and amazing subjects and evangelising future use cases for new technology, I drew up the “Schools Semiconductor Education Programme” to take all this new amazing tech into schools across the UK and get the next generation inspired. (I was obsessed but the project didn’t happen - I couldn’t get the backing.)

I draw on those simple motivators - evangelising the new and complex - on almost every marketing project I work on. So, my idealistic definition of marketing, whether I’m applying it to selling VR goggles, solar panels, batteries or vacuum cleaners, promoting “cashless society” initiatives, fundraising for Ukrainians, promoting broadband for rural communities or lobbying Government to change laws on internet access, is about evangelising good things.

(I started my marketing journey in PR and the concept of “earned media” and, broadly speaking, I’ve never built a specialism in “advertising” or “paid media” so I think that influences my preference to see marketing as evangelism, where you earn the customer engagement, rather than marketing being advertising, which is driven by paying $$$ to drum home messages through any medium which changes behaviour by persistent repetition.)

Call my definition of marketing “good marketing”. (Icky, yes, I know.)

The criticisms of marketing are long and various, and I’m going to air them for a few moments right now, head-on and full-throttle, before I wriggle my way around them and try to justify my pathetic existence in that squalid world:

• marketing is about confidence tricks, scams, stunts, lies, deceits (“50% of marketers are liars - the other 50% haven’t been found out yet” - thank you Alex McCann)

• it’s selling people things they don’t need, and the “whole marketing industry and advertising invents new needs we didn’t know we had” (thank you Alden Wicker for inspo)

• our planet needs a brutal commitment to de-growth, we each need to use less and own less, we should be embracing minimalism, we all need to eliminate consumerism - marketing is the antithesis of that (thank you Kate Raworth)

• capitalism will kill the planet, it is the problem, consumption is the key to capitalism and marketing is the key to consumption - so marketers are the soldiers of the planet’s destruction (thank you George Monbiot)

• marketing, PR, fake-news, dark money, propaganda, advertising and mass media are all part of an evil conspiracy that has manipulated public opinion, voting and purchasing behaviours in favour of tobacco, oil, big pharma, and all manner of other giant corporations, so that the interests of giant corporations now completely override the interests of humans, wildlife, and our natural resources (see more from Vandana Shiva)

So here’s my wriggle, and it’s brutally simple: Marketing is vital.

Our need to communicate, to advocate for improvement, to evangelise for a better world has never, ever, in the history of the planet been so important as it is today.

I want to be part of an organisation of marketers who are the best in the world at their craft, people who can work with new ideas and concepts and bring them to large numbers of people to effect behaviour change, who can work with governments, corporations, communities, entrepreneurs and everyone to power change at a global scale.

Not all marketing is good, I agree with that. Obviously. But good marketing has an absolutely massive role to play in improving our planet and our societies. Progress on the UN SDGs or the Global Goals will fail without the best possible marketing. We have got so much to do to communicate, persuade and encourage everyone - every single person, company and organisation - to do whatever they can to progress us.

Our good marketing evangelism may well be with Google Slides and Sheets, Zoom calls, budgets, Asanas, Slack channels, plans, strategies and meetings which lead to posts, articles, videos, GIFs and other social media marketing techniques (yes, with influencers, KOLs, KOCs and all of that too). We’ll use sophisticated tools like Sprinklr and HubSpot, we’ll talk analytics and data, CPA and acquisition costs, customer segmentation, behaviour funnels and all that. We’ll use events, meetups, exhibitions, demonstrations. We’ll use lobbying, protesting, and marching. We’ll use art, plays, theatre, drama, films, drawings and installations.

I’m proud to work with people who not only do this stuff, but who want to do much, much more of it, the most efficient and effective good marketing that there can possibly be, world-class and at global scale and with end results which, we all hope, will have massive impact.

(I will explore how we try to direct our marketing skills towards good things and away from bad things in my next post. It’s not as simple.)