This is the founders’ letter marking the start of the third annual IRG100 program. It sets out what businesses need from marketing and challenges CMOs to take responsibility for driving more humanized growth.
Ikigai is the organizing idea: the sweet spot between what you love, what you are good at, what you get paid for and what the world needs from you. The letter’s claim is that for marketing, that sweet spot is now driving humanized growth.
Key findings
- Winning companies now focus more on value creation for colleagues, customers, communities and the capital markets, which IRG calls humanized growth.
- The letter frames that shift as fundamental, providing meaning to everyone involved while also bringing significant financial rewards to the companies that embrace it.
- IRG’s own study finds 78 percent of 2020 and 2021 respondents agreeing their business has evolved toward a more humanized growth strategy.
- Sixty-five percent of IRG100 participants report that their influence on business strategy has increased.
- More than 80 percent of ESG funds outperformed their benchmarks in 2020.
Regaining influence
The letter concedes the case against marketing before COVID. Some companies replaced the CMO with the more commercially titled chief growth officer. Harvard Business Review published The Trouble with CMOs. Spencer Stuart reported another decline in average tenure, and IPA research found fewer than half of directors confident describing how marketing added value.
The turn is what two years did. Winning marketers now increase their influence by helping their company shift from shareholder primacy to multi-stakeholder value creation, in businesses that understand purpose and empathy and prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion. The specific contribution named is research that reveals stakeholder needs, including the growing need for human connection among colleagues.
Building on the momentum
The letter is careful that this did not begin recently. The business world has spent more than two decades debating the evolving role of capitalism in society. At Davos in 2008 Bill Gates made a plea for conscious capitalism, and while many chief executives were sympathetic, most said they could not move without their investors’ blessing.
That blessing took another ten years. BlackRock’s 2018 annual CEO letter demanded that companies it invests in make a positive contribution to society, and the US Business Roundtable responded almost immediately with a statement on the purpose of the corporation that locked in the shift away from shareholder primacy.
Since then Davos has moved further toward a sustainable business agenda, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals have become an integral part of the language of global business. The letter names three accelerants: COVID, the social unrest following the murder of George Floyd, and the commitments made at COP26.
Now is the time
The work ahead is described as hard. Building an insightful understanding of the needs of all stakeholders is a challenge, and creating value propositions that meet unmet needs across all of them is harder still. That is precisely where the fundamental capabilities of the marketing function lie, which is where the CMO can help the chief executive and the rest of the C-suite.
The founders are explicit that this is not only about career. Today’s existential sustainability and social issues are an urgent call to action for marketers to help their companies succeed and do the right thing. If not now, then when.
The examples given are brands that grew while changing behavior: Dove building brand growth and women’s self-esteem, First Direct offering financial services while improving mental wellbeing, and Tide removing stains while persuading people to wash at 30 degrees rather than 60. The ask is to help deliver what Paul Polman calls the business plan for the planet, the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. If not you, then who.
The closing argument is that disruption has created a situation where what the world needs fully correlates with what marketers can offer, and that stepping up pays morally and financially. Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals is described as unlocking trillions in value and hundreds of millions of jobs within the decade.
Scope and limitations
This is a founders’ letter rather than a research report. The two supporting figures come from IRG’s own Growth Study, which drew on interviews with around 750 global senior business leaders, 5,000 online survey contributions from 73 countries, an AI analysis of over 3,500 growth publications, and behavioral analysis of public LinkedIn data.
Source
This page summarises The Ikigai of Marketing, by Frank van den Driest, Marc de Swaan Arons, 2022.