Six Reasons Marketing Must Change

A number of trends have converged in my mind this week to convince me that marketing has to change — AGAIN. A pendulum has swung too far without us noticing it, and it’s about to hit us in the face as it swings back if we aren’t careful.

Here are six trends that point to the need for change:

1. the #MeToo moments that have altered the career trajectories of a number of (mostly male) influencers,
2. the publication of Clayton Christensen’s new book Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, with its core theory that we hire a product or service to do a job, and products and services must be designed to be hired by the right customers,
3. the growth of the mindfulness movement in Silicon Valley, with entrepreneurs who have made it going off on ten-day silent retreats and starting organizations to curtail the influence of companies they helped to build,
4. the disillusionment all of us early adopters feel about social media, especially Facebook, especially after young, red-headed Christopher Wylie exposed how our own personal data was used against us. This includes a plaintive post by Brian Solis about taking control back, and a five-year old crusade by Randi Zuckerberg to put digital technology into perspective for our children
5. the coming of the values-driven Millennial generation into the job and consumer markets (hint: they buy on values)
6. and the upcoming launch of the Global Data Privacy Regulation in May.

These are big events that don’t leave marketers untouched.

For the past two decades, we’ve been focused on becoming data geeks in the marketing department. Old style CMOs were forced out by quants, and the goal was to get “more accurate data” about where the”customer” was on her “journey” to buying our product.

But one thing data has overlooked is values, and I believe values will be the most important piece of marketing in the future. Companies will have to declare their values and live by them. And this is not a mission statement that gets put up on the office wall in the break room. Values are different. You can’t lie about your values, because they’ll show and customers will know. Southwest values employees, Starbucks values connectedness, RichRoll.com values a healthy lifestyle.

Once companies have figured out what their values really are, marketers will be able to begin the search for human beings who naturally align with the company’s values, and turn those people into customers. It should be easy, because it converts what used to be a sales process into a reaching out and calling to the people who naturally value what you have to offer.

Wouldn’t it be cool if marketing evolved again from shoving things on customers, to prying into peoples’ lives to find out more about them, to naturally aligning with people who already share our values — for whom we’re the right product or service for the job they want done?