The session asks what it takes to win, and answers with humanized growth: multi-stakeholder value creation across colleagues, customers, community and the capital markets. To explain why that is contested, it runs the intellectual history from Adam Smith through shareholder primacy to the present.
The second half is about marketing itself. The function’s influence has been decreasing and student enrollment declining, which the deck puts as a question about whether marketing is in crisis. The answer offered is a redefinition of the CMO role around purpose, stakeholder insight and message alignment.
Key findings
- The historical argument starts in 1776 with Adam Smith and the claim that individual ambition serves the common good.
- Alfred Marshall’s 1890 definition is used as the counterweight: economics examines the attainment of wellbeing.
- Shareholder primacy is dated to 1974 and characterized as myopic self-interest, with GDP treated as an absurd metric and disparity increasing.
- The shift the deck describes is from corporations balancing interests to a weaponized reading of the Friedman doctrine, with the license to grow now being challenged.
- COVID accelerated trends already under way and pivoted stakeholder attention from customers and capital markets toward colleagues and community.
- Marketing’s contribution is defined through three verbs: think, feel and do. Raising awareness and shifting mindsets, building a sense of belonging and passion, and enabling behavior change.
Two centuries of argument
The account starts with Adam Smith in 1776 and the proposition that individual ambition serves the common good, then sets Alfred Marshall’s 1890 definition beside it: economics examines the attainment of wellbeing. The Industrial Revolution is where the invisible hand is first questioned, and where robber barons and then visible hands enter the story.
Shareholder primacy arrives in 1974, and the deck reads its consequences as myopic self-interest, the absurdity of GDP as a metric, and increasing disparity. Consumer influence and citizen influence rise alongside it, and the KPIs start to change.
The counter-movement is traced through conscious capitalism, with the Body Shop and Patagonia as examples, Michael Porter’s creating shared value in 2011, and Laurence Fink of BlackRock in 2018 arguing that a company must not only deliver financial performance but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Then COVID struck.
Is marketing in crisis
The evidence offered for the function’s difficulty is decreasing marketing influence and declining marketing student enrollment. The deck poses it as a question rather than a verdict.
The reframing uses Ikigai, applied to the function rather than the person: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for, overlapping as passion, mission, vocation and profession.
The role definition that follows is broader than communications. Inspiring purpose and a window on the world through stakeholder insights on the internal side. Community activation, an employee value proposition, and total stakeholder message alignment on the external side.
The mechanism is the same one marketing has always used. Marketing drives how people think, feel and do: raising awareness and shifting mindsets, building a sense of belonging and passion, and enabling behavior change. Applied to all stakeholders rather than only to buyers, that is what drives multi-stakeholder and sustainable growth, with Patagonia as the illustration.
The update is that the position is improving: 65 percent report increased CMO influence on growth against 11 percent, and the closing challenge is the familiar one about whether, if not now and if not me, then when and who.
The study behind the next step
The session also introduced the Achieving Multistakeholder Impact study. Its agenda has six topics: a definition of multistakeholder growth, the most and least impactful initiatives, balancing interests with practical learning and pitfalls, measuring and communicating impact, leadership expectations, attitudes and habits, and the role of brands and marketing.
The method combines vision interviews with CEOs, CFOs, CCOs, CMOs, investor relations leaders and experts, a meta-analysis of multistakeholder growth initiatives and their results, and the Oxford FOMI Hypertrend AI tool used to identify key themes and emerging trends.
Participants were asked to take five minutes on the potential for their own business to drive more humanized growth, then discuss the implications for brands and for the CMO for twenty minutes.
Scope and limitations
The historical section is an argument rather than a study, built from named authors and dates. The Achieving Multistakeholder Impact study is introduced here at the design stage, with its method stated and no results yet reported.
Source
This page summarises Role of Business, Brands and the CMO, by Marc de Swaan Arons, January 2023.