Growth and Goodness: Can advertising do both?
Hell yes it can and hell yes, it should…
Here’s why:
- The evergreen problem of growth — all businesses need growth, so where’s the new growth going to come from?
- Well, we’re all competing for attention and it’s only going to get worse as we move away from scanning our handheld devices and move to voice and gesture commands on smarter wearable tools to order what we want or ask for help we are looking for something in an increasingly mobile, agile world. So you can’t bank on repetition and frequency in any media to make up for true breakthrough creativity, meaning, significance and quality.
- The Younger Generation (whether Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z or Gen Double AA) (no matter what else you read or heard at last week’s “Selling to Gen Y” webinar) younger people increasingly value happiness and goodness in life, in relationships, politics, business and the products and brands they buy and share in social media. So …
I thought about posting a video, a Medium story link or a research firm’s pie chart image here, but I thought… you don’t need that, do you?
Oh, you do?
- Aren’t you yourself absolutely sick and tired of sexual abuse, corrupt politicians, weather extremes, money problems, anxiety, threats of war, poverty, fear about the future and ….hence, we all want goodness. We all need some goodness.
- Brands are always properly anxious and nervous about where and how much to spend, so agencies need to think harder about the craft of communication in these frantically-changing times. Younger people aren’t image-status-seeking boomers and even though they so fluidly cruise through their digital life, remember, technology didn’t change and disrupt their life as it did us older folk. They are looking deeper and looking for meaning and transparency and yes, ask them yourself — for goodness, truth and transparency.
Most brands and their agencies of course, will trust in increased invasiveness into more spaces and places, arranging strategic media partnerships and alliances and buying sponsored searches and returns on those aforementioned smarter voice and gesture-directed wearables.
But instead, I’m kindly suggesting that if you’re looking for growth in this tech-driven digital world, that you look at goodness for your growth. Goodness in business models, goodness in product and service design, goodness in business ethics, goodness in your policies and human capital, and goodness me, some actual, real goodness in your messages, whether in 280 characters or three seconds of video.
It can be done. And it should be done.
Thanks for reading.
So please tell me, where do you think goodness exists in future business?
