Where did marketing go wrong?

Consumer culture promises us that we can buy our way to happiness, to success, to fulfilment. It convinces us that the reason we do not yet feel all those things is because we haven’t yet got the latest sports car, the biggest house, the fanciest job title. This is a clever way to run the economy and to generate shareholder return. But the promise of fulfillment remains unattainable. As humans, we will always want more. We never seem to reach the final destination. We lose ourselves in the constant chase for success and start soul searching to find more meaning to life, to reconnect and “find” ourselves. 

What we neglect to see in the business world is that, under soulless leadership, brands have lost themselves too. Success is measured based on infinite growth. Year-on-year, the indices need to be positive. The profit needs to be bigger, the cashflow higher.

Yet we struggle to articulate why our brand exists, what its purpose is, who it is here to serve and how it improves people’s lives.

We also seem to have forgotten, or have simply conveniently chosen to be oblivious to the fact that, the planet’s resources are finite. Every year, we use 1.75 Earth’s worth of resources. We are literally stealing these resources from future generations. And yet the chase for growth and consumption continues.

The origins of marketing

To find the origin of marketing as we know it today, we must look back to the 1920s and a man named Edward Bernays.

Bernays was one of the inventors of PR. He was also Sigmund Freud’s nephew. He became fascinated by his uncle’s theories on unconscious desires and realized that he could use these theories to sell many more products.

He was the first to show his clients how, by linking products to images and symbols, they could tap into those unconscious desires that Freud had identified.

This created a shift from a needs-based culture to a desires-based culture. A culture which promises us that we can buy our way to happiness, success, and fulfilment.

And so, we live in a consumption economy. A constant chase for more.

And with it, the catastrophic climate, and social challenges that we are now facing.

Since Edward Bernays created this desires-based marketing, it has become a powerful tool which is used carelessly. In just one century, we have created a monster.

Isn’t it time that we challenged the status quo?

The disillusionment of a profession

In today’s world, marketing has become the bad guy. Dare I say, it is even seen as somewhat evil? In a recent survey by World Federation for Advertisers, 73% marketeers felt that marketing wasn’t fit for purpose in today’s world. It is no surprise that the profession is seeing people leave in throngs.

One of the biggest issues with marketing today is that people interpret marketing to be what comes at the end of the process, how a company communicates to sell its products, the advertising and promotion.

The frenzy over data and digital has completely taken over from brand building, the heart of true marketing. Building a brand is about truly understanding why it exists and what it stands for to build genuine connections with the communities that it serves over the long-term. Instead, marketing has become about short-term growth tactics, mass media, promotions, and paid influencers.

What has been forgotten is that marketing is about the entire process. Starting with what the brand stands for, what its leadership role models, the innovation that it brings, the communities it serves and connects with. You have to start with your brand and your marketing, not end with it.

As the role of sustainability becomes increasingly unavoidable for brands, the risk is that ESG will simply get added on to broken brand fundamentals. Or worse yet, that sustainability, like digital a few years ago, will be considered as separate from marketing. This will only create more silos and lack of accountability internally, whilst completely lacking authenticity externally.

It’s not about adding ESG to an existing business model. It is about completely rewiring the way business operates, fully integrating purpose into the core of what a brand stands for, into its soul.

The magic of purpose

Throughout my career, I have heard the terms “power brands”, “love brands”, “leader brands” to describe successful brands that make an impact in people’s lives. But what truly matters to build brands into any one of those terminologies is their soul.

Brands, like people, have the ability to lead and connect. They have the power to influence beliefs and create new habits. By using their innovation, resources, and scale to serve society and address the world’s biggest challenges, brands can create movements of positive change.

Over the past 3 years, we have lived through Black Lives Matter, the Covid pandemic, a war breaking out in Ukraine, a food and energy crisis. And it won’t stop there. This is the world that we live in today.

If the world’s recent events have shown us anything, it is how fragile both our economic and ecological systems are. We are all interdependent, brands, companies, communities, countries. And we all depend on a healthy planet and biodiversity to exist and thrive.

Without a clear purpose as an anchor, most brands have been struggling to know how to respond.

A brighter future ?

What drives the most successful brands and, as such, the greatest value for shareholders, is the vision of changing the world in some way. Your brand should exist to serve its purpose, not the other way around.

The problem is that marketing today is no longer fit for purpose.

It’s time for us to wake up to the new reality we are living in. To remember that the role of brands is first and foremost to make our lives better, our communities stronger and our world a place where we can all flourish. To disrupt what marketing has become. And start a new conversation about what it could be.

If we know that marketing has the power to tap into inner feelings and desires, imagine the possibilities if we used it to shift beliefs and consumption behaviors to more sustainable and prosperous ways of living.

It’s time to challenge the existing paradigm. To reinvent marketing to create a new economy.

It’s time to build brands for a new world!