The future of marketing is people
The best marketing of the best ideas to the best audiences, making the best version of humanity, will always be:
Understanding people as people and not just as consumers, customers, members, and users
Getting people to advocate for a brand to other people
Upgrading the lives of others and building real, authentic relationships, be it brands, products, or with humanity.
Marketing is about understanding others through the lens in which we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves.
All too often, with the speed of life and tech in our digital age, marketers have fixated on consumers, customers, members, and users, chasing KPI and ROI, but we’re waking up to a reality, perhaps before it’s too late, that we need to get back to seeing each other as relationship, nurturing and enriching those through old fashioned conversation.
One must look at consumers not as easy marks or pliable by some garbage in garbage out ChatGPT barfed up supposedly SEO-friendly copy that reads like a distracted teenage boy explaining a video game they’ve never played but as real people.
People deserve to be talked to in a levelheaded way that connects with them, because the content was written for them, and not by a bot.
People are not brands, and many big brands are forgetting this
Viewing people as consumers or users means evaluating and benchmarking one’s brands with the use of other brands in one’s category. However, the greatest threat and opportunity tend to come from outside one’s category today due to technological disruption and changing behavior. And yet, there’s some fallacy if we follow the logic of:
Newspapers were disrupted by Google.
Magazines by Instagram
Television by Netflix.
Focusing on consumers as merely end users has become a race to the bottom, where each brand acts to be more pandering and less consumer-focused than the next chasing numbers, not loyalty, flirting with irrelevancy.
One of the reasons categories get disrupted from the outside is that by seeking to understand a person through category dynamics, one may miss understanding what they are truly seeking.
People aren’t seeking a brand as much as seeking more for less, cost is important to the majority of people and, if given a choice between meh but it works vs. ‘this is the most popular hence most expensive,’ especially in 2023, the former will beat the latter for the majority of the population.
Brand marketing is advocacy
Brand marketing is getting people to advocate for you to other people. The most powerful form of marketing has always been word of mouth. Word of mouth has become exponentially more powerful due to social media and new tools and technologies.
TikTok provides editing and other tools to let anyone create and mix videos. Substack enables reaching tens of thousands to millions of people. It is easy to create and distribute podcasts.
Social media channels enable distribution. Influencers and creators become key to a brand. And only the most vapid or clueless will insist that’s not empty, hollow, and devoid of humanity as any product or service or anything in the history of marketing.
This said, instead of marketing to people, we should market through people by arming them with assets, information, tools, and incentives. Marketing should fixate on their employees and suppliers and how it serves cultures, communities, and the world at large.
Make employees advocates by treating them well and aligning them with the marketing program.
Inform, trust, and listen to people; they’re the source of ideas, marketing, and competitive intelligence… people are everything.
Every company’s marketing and media programs should be grounded in marketing through people with significant investment and emphasis on generating and building advocacy among one’s external and internal audiences and partners.
One should fixate as much, if not more, on people than fixating on first-party data, AI, the meta verse, or whatever latest buzzword bingo passes for headlines, especially in tech blogs and videos drumming up clicks.
Marketing focus should be about solving, not causing, problems.
Technology has become a double-edged sword. It’s empowered people to have the power to seek, search, and find information, and disinformation, all through channels such as search, social, e-commerce, and so on.
These new technologies not only merged offline and online, but the latter has also consumed us while, at the same time, fused marketing into our waking lives.
It’s become insidious that marketing has seeped into our everyday lives to a degree we can’t avoid it, and, in some ways, this is innocence lost.
Critical mass marketing
Marketers’ power has diminished in most companies’ top brass by way of pencil pushers looking for fast, cheap, and easy ways to get to audiences for the quick buck instead of loyal customers.
At one time, the CMO, or head of marketing, had great power and responsibilities at companies, now it seems the focus is on the CTO, where money is thrown at them to solve what is perceived as marketing problems, when in fact, technology and marketing, from a business perspective, are not one and the same.
But the reality remains that ethical marketers dwindling in number but still exist in companies are still the best voices for their target audiences, the bridge connecting their product or service offerings with the people who are paying for it. Something most CTO, CFO, or CEO haven’t a clue about or care about, often chalking up everything to be profit and loss.
Without marketing as the backbone of an organization — and this has bore out many, many times with top companies often faltering if not failing — you’ve lost the most important bridge between product and being of service.
As such, any company worth its salt that gives a damn knows marketing should be in every major internal and external audience-facing decision.
Marketing drives customer conversions and solidifies brand longevity and reputation using storytelling, design, and adding a cultural spin that draws emotion, focusing on a consumer’s way better than any AI or flash-in-the-pan bandaid companies are bandwagoning in a make-a-quick-buck schemes that have been presented en mass over the past three months..
As such, people in marketing not only deserve but must have a greater voice along with encouragement and enrichment to upgrade skills and capabilities for a world where marketing is not merely the sidecar attached to a motorcycle but the engine that makes the motorcycle and its engine throb.
The future of business has, and always will be, marketing, and marketing is, and will always be, a transactional relationship first and foremost between people.