Does marketing contribute to society’s ills?

Jon Alexander accuses marketing of sleepwalking society towards a precipice and believes marketers need to think more about the wider impacts of their work. Rory Sutherland defends conspicuous consumption, arguing that status-seeking is innate and a competitive economy is required to promote a healthy variety in the ways in which people express it

JON ALEXANDER'S CASE FOR CHANGE

THE ATTITUDE of the marketing industry to criticism is often an exasperated “not us again!” We look back to The Hidden Persuaders in the 1950s, and sigh that the debate has not moved on. It goes in cycles – the critics start quiet, the rumble rises to a brief crescendo, and then fades away into irrelevance once more.

The rumble is starting to be heard again. But this time I think it is different, for two reasons. First, because this time there’s a wider round of soul-searching starting as the financial crisis staggers on, and as China and the East rise in influence. Systemic change is on the agenda, in which every industry will operate fundamentally differently – including, but not limited to, marketing.

And second, because this time, insiders like myself and a whole generation of rising leaders think that marketing has now gone too far.

My view is this: the people who work in marketing could be major contributors to the systemic change we need to see in the world. But at the moment, we are doing more to trap society on its current path to disaster than to facilitate creative change.

Path to disaster sounds dramatic, and perhaps it is. But we know that the current pattern of society, the pursuit of economic growth at all costs, is inherently unsustainable. We are already seeing food and water crises starting to take hold around the world, as well as in our own backyards, caused and aggravated by a potent combination of population growth and climatic change.

In this context, we in the UK are market leaders in an industry in which fundamental change is inevitable. The gravitational pull of continuing as we are is strong, and danger signs can always be ignored. After all, the other big players are following the same path. But market conditions will change. Our only choice is whether we lead the change and invent the new, or wait for crisis to cripple us. The financial crisis is merely the first round of shockwaves.

CREATIVITY IS NEEDED

The people who work in marketing could be a major part of this change. This is because what is most required is true creativity.

True creativity is not measured in industry awards, such as Lions and Pencils. Indeed, true creativity is not rewarded at all, at least not in a way that can be anticipated before the event. True creativity lies in finding a way through what the great systems thinker Gregory Bateson called the ‘double bind’ – a situation that current patterns of thinking cannot resolve, and which requires a leap to a whole new level.

We are in such a situation today. Tim Jackson, a professor of economics and former UK sustainable development commissioner, frames the double bind like this: growth is unsustainable, but any alternative to growth is equally unstable.

In other words, a society has emerged that depends on growth for stability – and yet growth itself is destroying that society.

This is where my first point comes in: the people who work in marketing could be major contributors to systemic change. Double binds require a leap to solve them, a new way of thinking to be found. They require creativity and comfort with uncertainty. People who work in marketing have these skills. We recognise and value the creative leap, not just the rational analysis. And we have the ability to work with uncertainty as a valid way to solve problems. Yet the only people working on these issues today are civil servants, economists and scientists.

And what are we doing in the meantime? Frankly, not anything constructive. This is my second point: at present, the main contribution of marketing people is to crack the whip of growth, driving society’s chariot ever harder towards the precipice. We keep our heads down and devote our creative efforts to the pursuit of Lions and Pencils – rewards that recognise increasingly perverse behaviour.

“We don’t know where the consumer is going to be any more, so we have to be everywhere. Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.” These are the words of an agency CEO in the US, quoted in the New York Times last year. Just think about what she’s saying for a minute. The market is pervading every aspect of our lives, expanding our consumer consciousness at the expense of all other ways of participating in society. And this expansion is the type of behaviour we most reward. Not only are we all consumers now; we are all consumers all the time. So what is a society doing to itself when it tells its members that their primary role is as consumer?

Commentators on last summer’s riots observed that these were the world’s first consumer riots, as people tried clothes on before looting them

THE DARK SIDE OF MATERIALISM

The answer from recent research in social psychology is this: when people are thinking in the mode of consumers, primed and prompted by marketing messages on all sides, we are more materialistic, less concerned about the wellbeing of others, more concerned about our status relative to others, and less happy in ourselves.

A dark picture, and one we are seeing played out in Britain. A recent UNICEF scorecard placed the UK 24th out of 24 industrialised nations for childhood wellbeing. A follow-up ethnographic study that compared British children to those in Spain and Sweden identified childhood materialism as a principal factor.

Several commentators on last summer’s riots observed that these were the world’s first consumer riots, as people tried clothes on before looting them. The Riots and Communities Panel expressed concern at the impact of excessive consumerism on the young people involved. There is a degree of inevitability. If people are told that to participate in society is to consume, they will do so by whatever means necessary. If they have no money, that will mean looting.

My prescription for marketing to benefit society, then, is twofold. First, let’s put some limits on where marketing can go in people’s lives now, before it is too late. We might profitably start with childhood, and give our children a chance simply to be children before they become consumers. Second, let’s remember what creativity really is. That’s what we’re here for, after all. 

Jon Alexander is brand strategist at the National Trust [email protected]

RORY SUTHERLAND RESPONDS WITH A DARWINIAN DEFENCE OF CONSUMERISM

It was a Norwegian-American oddball genius, Thorstein Veblen (1857- 1929), who coined the famous phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’, and who has given his name to a class of products called Veblen goods1.

A successor of his at Cornell is Professor Robert H Frank. I recommend reading The Darwin Economy, his recent critique of consumerism (he proposes, among other things, that taxation be shifted from income to consumption). It is a very cogent argument.

Interestingly, Frank is an ardent Darwinist. So was Veblen. Both believe that economics should be founded on Darwinian principles.

I’ve always thought that, if you are going to spend your time reading business case studies, you should start with the best one there is – the greatest start-up of all time: the story of life on earth.

And to some extent, we have already absorbed the idea that animals increase their fitness over time through natural selection. Many businesspeople probably see their role as one of facilitating and accelerating a kind of Darwinian process – closing down underperforming divisions, while investing more in areas which deliver an advantage.

This model is Darwinism as nature’s accountant, concerned with cashflow, survival and efficiency.

DARWIN'S OTHER IDEA: SEXUAL SELECTION

But, as Frank points out, Darwin actually had not one, but two astounding ideas. Evolution is not one-dimensional. For, as well as the accountancy function, Darwin also recognised a marketing function. It’s all in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex.

It is not enough for many organisms to eat, breathe and die. They also need to earn the attraction (or in my case, amused tolerance) of someone else, ideally of the same or greater genetic fitness in order to breed. Hence considerable resources are directed towards signalling genetic fitness (along with other attractive qualities, such as commitment, altruism or sociability) to the opposite sex. The pursuit of pure efficiency often takes a back seat to reputational considerations.

One way of displaying genetic fitness is through costly handicaps. This is the peacock’s tail theory. The theory suggests that, in the mind of the peahen, any male bird which can still function while carrying a huge decorative burden on its back must be pretty fit (in both senses of the word). So breed with that one. The peacock’s tail is a Veblen good.

The problem this creates for Darwinian economists such as Robert Frank is an interesting one. If animals get involved in runaway signalling competitions, it causes resources to be excessively directed towards a kind of competitive arms race. There is a feedback loop at work, where bull elk acquire ever-larger antlers – since their very costliness defines their status. This seems an unassailable objection.

There are surely areas of consumption in an economy where this is true. High-end property would seem to be one obvious area, along with jewellery, art and wine. It is simply a case of rivalrous consumption where resources are unproductively burned in pursuit of a kind of unending one-upmanship. An unwinnable game.

Yet some later thinking on sexual selection suggests that it’s not always as simple as this. Instead, it seems, much ‘progress’ in evolution happens obliquely – it delivers sexual advantages first, and only later provides material individual or social advantages.

So alongside the peacock’s tail and the elk’s antlers, we should also consider the human brain.

Many evolutionary experts attribute the origins of human intelligence to sexual selection. Language, poetry, humour, music – and, indeed, altruism – arose from our inner marketing function long before they proved their worth to finance. We developed brains (and needlessly large vocabularies) to build relationships long before they became useful for building railways.

Any male bird which can still function while carrying a huge decorative burden on its back must be pretty fit… The peacock’s tail is a Veblen good

Feathers and wings on birds, too, it is believed, evolved and grew for purposes of display before they proved useful in flight.

Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind puts it like this… “[To work,] evolution needs something like a venture capitalist. It needs something that can protect the very early stages of an innovation against the ravages of a competitive market and the laws of bankruptcy, by extending it a line of credit. Sexual selection works as evolution’s venture capitalist.”

IN DEFENCE OF CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

Now here, I think, is one good Darwinian defence of conspicuous consumption. Yes, some luxury goods are pointless and wasteful. But most of these will become outmoded and déclassé (if you want a really good laugh, look at an upmarket magazine from the 1970s – their idea of classy food looks disgusting to us now). But many Veblen goods are capitalism’s R&D. Some of them go on to deliver spectacular benefits to a far wider part of society.

Jacqui Waugh has just sent me a superb dissertation on advertising, which quotes a book called Understains: The sense and seduction of advertising. Its author, Kathy Myers, believes advertising drives “the weak-spirited public… to acquire unnecessary objects like dishwashers, electric toothbrushes and dog hoovers”.

This book was published not in 1956, but in 1986. Just 26 years later, I read the sentence with bafflement. I don’t have a dog hoover, since I don’t have a dog, but if you suffer from allergies, it seems a good idea. Spending £100 on an electric toothbrush is cheaper than a single extra trip to the dentist. And the idea of the dishwasher as a pointless item is deranged.

Not smelling revolting was a status symbol once. “Who’s he?” “Dunno, probably a king or something.” “Why do you think that?” “Because he hasn’t got shit all over him.” is an exchange from that seminal sociological treatise, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

This nature lesson suggests that advertising can, at its best, help people redefine what ‘status’ means – to direct the pursuit of status away from activities which have no positive externalities towards positivesum games. The best advertising does this already. ‘Think small’, perhaps the most famous advertisement of all time, did this: buying a Beetle was a countercultural status-play in response to the excesses of 1960s US car design (reverse signalling is the technical term). Dove does the same – making beauty an intrinsic good, rather than a positional good.

Creativity challenges the status quo of status. Ads which merely restate a paradigm (ie most luxury goods and fashion advertising, which are not produced by advertising agencies at all) are creatively very dull. Apple, now a dominant player, not a challenger, has begun producing relatively lacklustre work. ‘Think similar.’

Status seeking is innate. But the best advertising, at least in a competitive economy, can help to promote healthy variety in the ways people express it.

Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of OgilvyOne London and Ogilvy Group UK  [email protected]

1. Veblen goods are a class of commodities where demand (to some degree) increases with price, often because their principal function is to display their owner’s wealth or, in the case of gifts, generosity.

This article featured in Market Leader, July 2012.