This is an episode of Opinion Party, a podcast about the myths of marketing, hosted by Laura Jones. The guest is the community director of the Institute for Real Growth. His role is to inspire and connect a community that now numbers 800 chief marketing officers, many of whom are isolated in their own organizations and find peers facing the same problems.
The argument running through the conversation is that business now carries work governments cannot finish, and that people do not trust it to. That gap is what he calls a disconnect between business and humanity, and closing it is how he states his own purpose.
Key findings
- Uncertainty as tracked by bodies such as the World Economic Forum and the IMF has never been higher than it is now.
- Research from the World Federation of Advertisers found that people would not care if 60 to 70 percent of brands disappeared from their lives.
- 2024 saw four billion people vote across 62 democracies, and in all of them the government changed. De Boer reads that as evidence of social unrest and of eroded trust in government.
- The job has widened rather than deepened. A leading executive search specialist for the role now describes a CMO plus profile: everything marketing always did, with AI, sustainability, and geopolitical tension added on top.
- The reason to understand social and cultural change is financial, not decorative. It is how a business understands its future cash flows, and cash flow is a language boards act on where marketing metrics are not.
Why the burden has shifted to business
De Boer starts from uncertainty and the limits of government. The problems are too large for states to solve alone, and companies have capabilities that make them useful: skill, inventiveness, and commercial bandwidth to make an impact.
The obstacle is credibility. When companies act, people suspect greenwashing. That suspicion is the symptom he treats as the real problem, a disconnect between business and humanity, and the only route back is understanding what is actually changing in society and in people’s needs.
Human-proofing the future
The phrase de Boer uses is human-proofing rather than future-proofing, and the check behind it is uncomfortable. Marketers see their own touchpoint as central to a customer’s life. The World Federation of Advertisers found that people would not miss 60 to 70 percent of brands if they vanished. The question that follows is whether what a company creates is relevant and meaningful to anyone at all.
He assigns that work to marketing specifically. Finance will not supply a lens on society. Marketers are the window to the world and the people who make sense of what is happening in it. The translation into commercial terms follows: humanized growth creates value for colleagues, consumers, and communities, and then for the capital markets.
The argument he makes to a finance audience is about valuation. Understanding which needs will arise and how behavior and sentiment are shifting is how a company estimates its future cash flows. Clicks and views do not speak to that, and de Boer says so plainly.
How the leadership program strips the titles off
The program opens by removing rank. Participants are told the business card and the title do not matter here. The interest is in dreams and fears rather than awards or budgets, and there is an exercise built to get people talking about them.
Retreats take the same idea further. One was held deep in the Panamanian rainforest to connect participants with nature. The signature exercise is a single repeated question. Peers sit together for ten minutes and ask only where you are from, then ask it again, and the geographical answer gives way to something else. Later rounds ask where you are now and where you are going.
The purpose is not therapeutic for its own sake. Another question asks people what crossroad they are standing at and what could happen next. The aim is to align a person’s passion and ability with what the world needs, in a way that can also be paid for.
From sensing demand to guiding behavior
De Boer argues the function is changing. Marketing has always sensed what people want and served it. He describes a pivot to something harder: guiding, almost instructing, people on how to live. He acknowledges that most brands and marketers find this frightening, because nobody wants to tell people what to do.
The reason he presses the point is that nobody else in a company can do it. Influencing sustainable consumer behavior is marketing’s work. A less salty pizza or an electric car only counts if people choose it, order it, and tell their friends about it.
What the award-winning work looks like
Every year participants write an impact plan, and the strongest are recognized. One winner came from a fruit company where two-thirds of a pineapple’s weight, the leaf, was going to landfill. That waste became a plant-based leather sold to fashion brands including Nike, which is a fruit business selling into an entirely different category.
Another winner, at a semiconductor company under pressure, started by asking investors why they rated the company as they did, and ended with a tool for identifying fake news. De Boer’s summary of the standard is commercial and unsentimental. The work has to be a profitable solution to a problem in the world, because this is not an NGO.
Scope and limitations
This is a podcast conversation between the host and IRG’s own community director, recorded at an IRG event, so it is an account of the institute’s work by the person who runs it. The examples are chosen by him and no independent evaluation of the program’s effect is offered here.
The statistics are cited in speech without method or sample detail. The World Federation of Advertisers finding and the 2024 election figures are quoted as given. The source is an automatic caption track, so names of people and organizations are frequently mistranscribed in it.
Source
This page summarises Human Connection as Competitive Advantage: Navigating…, by Institute for Real Growth.