Frank van den Driest and Marc de Swaan Arons wrote this to mark the start of the third annual IRG100 Leadership Program. Their argument is a challenge to CMOs: take responsibility for helping your company drive more humanized growth.
The frame is ikigai, which they define as the sweet spot between what a person loves, what they are good at, what they get paid for and what the world needs from them. Their claim is that the disruption of the previous two years has aligned what the world needs with what marketers can offer.
Key findings
- Winning companies now focus more on value creation for all their stakeholders: colleagues, customers, communities and the capital markets. The founders call this humanized growth, and describe it as a shift that provides meaning while also bringing significant financial rewards.
- The starting position was weak. Before COVID there was a lot of talk about the declining reputation and receding influence of CMOs and of marketing as a discipline, with some companies replacing the CMO with a chief growth officer.
- Three external signals are cited for that weakness: a Harvard Business Review bundle titled The Trouble with CMOs, Spencer Stuart reporting another decline in average CMO tenure, and IPA research finding that fewer than half of all directors felt confident describing how marketing added value.
- The IRG Growth Study records the shift. 78 percent of 2020 and 2021 respondents agree their business has moved toward a more humanized growth strategy, and 65 percent of IRG100 participants report that their influence on business strategy has increased.
How the ground moved
The founders trace the argument over two decades. At Davos in 2008 Bill Gates argued for what he called conscious capitalism, and many CEOs were sympathetic but said they could not move without their investors’ blessing.
That blessing arrived ten years later. In BlackRock’s 2018 annual CEO letter, Larry Fink demanded that companies BlackRock invests in make a positive contribution to society, and the US Business Round Table responded almost immediately with a new statement on the purpose of the corporation.
Since then the UN Sustainable Development Goals have become part of the language of global business, and the transformation was accelerated by COVID, the social unrest following the murder of George Floyd, and the commitments made at COP26.
Why this is a marketing job
The founders are clear that the work is hard. Building an insightful understanding of the needs of all stakeholders is a challenge, and creating value propositions that deliver against unmet needs for all of them is harder still. That is exactly where marketing’s fundamental capabilities sit.
Marketers are already doing it by providing a window on the world that increases understanding of stakeholder needs, for example by using research to reveal the growing need for human connections between colleagues and the increased demand for open dialogue among community stakeholders.
Three examples are given of marketers using influence over consumer behavior to create change: Dove building brand growth and women’s self-esteem, First Direct offering financial services and improving mental wellbeing, and Tide removing stains while convincing consumers to wash at 30 degrees instead of 60.
The case for acting now
The founders point to Paul Polman’s phrase for the seventeen UN goals, the Business Plan for the Planet, and argue that marketers have the experience, skills, capabilities and attitudes to deliver it.
They add a financial argument. More than 80 percent of ESG funds outperformed their benchmarks in 2020, and meeting the Sustainable Development Goals is expected to unlock trillions in value and create hundreds of millions of jobs in this decade.
The closing instruction is a change of subject rather than a change of tactic. Shift the focus from losing influence to taking responsibility, because driving humanized growth is the ikigai of marketing.
Scope and limitations
The piece is stated as a founders’ perspective rather than a research report. The figures it cites come from IRG’s own study, which included around 750 interviews, 5,000 survey contributions from 73 countries, AI analysis of more than 3,500 growth publications and behavioral analysis of LinkedIn data.
Source
This page summarises The Ikigai of Marketing: IRG Founders Perspective, by Frank van den Driest, Marc de Swaan Arons, 2022.