The Essential Role of Marketing in Working for Good

I just completed this draft of an article at the request of my collaborator in marketing at Sounds True, Shelly Vickroy. Comments and questions welcome!

Working for Good is an orientation towards business and work focused on serving the greater good, contributing to create a better world in some way, with more sustainable, healthy, and fulfilling lives. In my definition of Working for Good the process is the product. That is, the way we conduct ourselves and treat each other and the world around us is as important as what we produce. We can work in a green business, a social service organization, or some other endeavor focused on making the world a better place, but if we treat others and ourselves with disregard or disrespect in the process, we end up creating something far short of our intention. The Working for Good approach cultivates embodied awareness and fosters connected collaboration, deepening our humanity and facilitating shared vision and aligned action to address pressing social and environmental issues, and to realize opportunities to enhance life. Working for Good fosters conscious business.

This is the context for considering the role of marketing in Working for Good, and how marketing can be a conscious act in service to the greater good.

What is Marketing?

Based on the blatant manipulations of mass market advertising, the astounding waste of direct mail and promotional trinkets, and the barrage of messages we receive everyday from marketing channels through all of our senses, many people who want to create a better world, with sustainable peace, prosperity, and happiness for all, think marketing is irrelevant at best, evil at worst.

In the context of Working for Good and conducting a conscious business, marketing serves an appropriate, necessary, and generative function. We can consider marketing as a process of communications focused on cultivating relationships. It is a process of representing who and what you – your company, your brand, your product or service – are: what you stand for, what value you promise to deliver to others, how you will relate to others. Conscious marketing let’s others know you exist and that you have something valuable to offer to them and to the world, and gives them an opportunity to consider engaging with you and your product or service. It doesn’t force them to, but makes the option available to them.

Marketing is like skin: it is the membrane that connects the inner business with the marketplace. To continue the metaphor, marketing is a function that covers and provides a window into the entire spectrum of a business. By representing and communicating what a business stands for and what it sells, marketing calls on everyone within it and every communication emanating from it to be clear, connected, and true to the essence and identity of the company. As a pervasive membrane, marketing serves an integrative function, holding a company together and reflecting its integrity. Just as healthy, radiant skin reflects a healthy person, healthy, radiant messages emanating from a business–through its employees, its communications materials, the way it produces, packages, and delivers its products and services, etc.–reflect a healthy business.

Marketing provides a platform for a business’ stakeholders—investors, customers, new team members, vendors, and others—to assess the integrity of the company. Does it deliver what it promises? Do its practices–such as the way it treats people, the environment, the communities where it conducts business–align with its stated intentions, values, and communications? As a permeable membrane, marketing facilitates two-way communication and exchange, inviting customers and other external stakeholders to inform and influence a company and, in some ways, to co-create it—refining its products and services, deepening its relationship to its stakeholders, and evolving its purpose.

Marketing in the Age of Transparency

Marketing takes on a whole new life in a world with universal access to instantaneous, global mass, communications and in which billions of people have immediate access to nearly infinite information, where secrets are quickly revealed to all. Through the blogsphere and videosphere, one person’s experience with a product, service, or company can become common knowledge overnight. The previously secret art and science of product development is now increasingly done in the open marketplace, engaging outsiders and even customers openly in the process.

ebay has built the web’s premier commerce site based on its reputation system and the transparency of transactions. Similarly, the performance ratings of third party sellers through amazon.com are visible to all.

George Holliday’s videotape of the Rodney King beating in 1991 demonstrated the power of transparency and sparked major riots. The revelations of the Enron, Tyco, Worldcom and other accounting scandals of the early 21st century catalyzed a new era of corporate transparency, enforced in part by the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation of 2002, but more powerfully fueled by growing demand from consumers, investors, and other stakeholders, and from an emerging recognition of the absolute necessity and competitive advantage afforded by voluntary transparency.

Consumers can now more effectively purchase in alignment with their values, as information about products, sourcing, ingredients, etcetera are readily available. And investors can invest in alignment with their values, as various indices track corporate behavior with respect to various social and environmental indicators.

The emerging ubiquity of transparency provides conscious entrepreneurs, who are building conscious businesses, with a competitive advantage. The marketplace increasingly rewards companies with an underlying embodied commitment to transparent, purpose-driven, relationship and collaboration-based business, through greater trust, loyalty, and engagement, as long as the company delivers quality products and services.

“Markets are conversations.”

The wired world has other significant implications for marketing in addition to transparency. As the authors of the 1999 treatise, The Cluetrain Manifesto, observed, “Markets are conversations” not monologues from companies to consumers–enabled by mass media–and the new social media technologies are facilitating global networks of informed and empowered consumers and employees. Companies are no longer the sole or even principal generator of ideas and information relating to their own business. “People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.”

Another reflection of the organic stakeholder system is the powerful phenomena known as “crowd sourcing,” which catalyzes the wisdom of groups to inform decisions. In We are Smarter than Me, Barry Liebert and Jon Spector “and thousands of contributors” tell the stories of dozens of businesses – from large corporations like Proctor & Gamble, Eli Lilly, IBM, and Virgin Mobile to smaller companies like Australian brewery Brewtopia – that are designing their products, creating marketing campaigns, delivering customer service and more, by tapping into large groups of people, online, around the world. Crowd sourcing deepens the interconnectedness between stakeholders and illuminates the reality that businesses exist in complex interdependent system of stakeholders.

Principles and Questions for Conscious Marketers

Here are some principles to guide conscious marketers, who operating in the context of marketing as a reflection of who we are and what we do–as a membrane, which fosters integrity and facilitates exchange between our inner and outer environments in a transparent, networked system. These principles are intended to guide our actions to foster deep connection and collaboration, learning and growth for yourself, your business, and your stakeholders.

The process is the product: assess your whole business system through this lens.

• Is our product or service fully aligned with purpose, values, and commitments?
• How does this communication–its process and content–reflect our purpose, values, and commitments?
• Are our internal processes–stakeholder relations, production process, waste management, etc–aligned with our purpose, values, and commitments?
• How are we considering the value of and the value we deliver to all of our stakeholders?

Marketing is conversation: in those actions that are specifically outward facing and intended to communicate about your company, brand, product or service, ask yourself:

• * Are our communications honest, open, and engaging, rather than manipulative?
• * Are we inviting our stakeholders into a conversation through the content, tone, and channels of our communications?
• * Are we willing to really listen to them and learn from them? And do they believe us?

Interdependence Facilitates Co-Creation: if we recognize the essential interdependence of life on earth and how this is reflected in what we do through our businesses, and if our deepest purpose is to participate in the evolution of life on earth and to contribute to creating sustainable peace, prosperity, and happiness for all, then…

• * How does the principle of interdependence inform our thinking and decisions?
• * Are we developing or employing systems, processes, and channels that facilitate collaboration and co-creation?
• * Do we cultivate an internal culture of collaboration, and does this culture of collaboration extend outwards to our external stakeholders, somewhat blurring the distinction between internal and external?

By employing the insights and skills of Working for Good, conscious marketing can become an art form for cultivating awareness, connection, collaboration, and co-creation in business. And it can become a tool for building a healthy, sustainable business, with deeply engaged stakeholders.