In this long-form interview Marc de Swaan Arons argues that marketing has lost influence in many places, and that the cause is internal rather than imposed. The discipline was distracted for over a decade by digital measurement, and stepped out of the discussions where a company decides where to play.
The remedy he offers rests on the IRG growth study, built from over 750 in-depth conversations with chief executives, chief financial officers, and chief marketing officers. It found that multi-stakeholder organizations outperform shareholder-primacy ones, and that marketers inside those organizations were gaining influence rather than losing it.
Key findings
- The growth study covered over 750 in-depth conversations with CEOs, CFOs, and CMOs, and began by asking each of them what they meant by growth.
- The stakeholder definition used is four C’s: colleagues, community, customers, and the capital markets that fund the business.
- The second condition on humanized growth is specific. A company grows its business and also advances one or more of the United Nations sustainable development goals. Organizations that could define how their brands did both were the ones outperforming.
- De Swaan Arons credits the shift in corporate language to an investor signal rather than to research. When the founder of BlackRock told companies that investment required more than profit projections, the Business Roundtable changed its purpose of the corporation statement after 50 years.
- The leadership profile IRG developed with the executive search firm Spencer Stuart is called the Da Vinci growth leader. The distinguishing element is not that Da Vinci was artist and scientist, but that he was also a founder of the humanism movement.
How the influence was lost
The historic weakness was accountability. Marketing was the largest spender on the profit and loss account. Asked about effectiveness, it fell back on the old line about half the spend being wasted. Nobody could say which half. De Swaan Arons is blunt that nobody earns respect from that answer.
Digital appeared to solve it. Click measurement offered proof at last, and spend moved. His objection is that the new proof was of the wrong thing. A click says nothing about whether a person now understands what a brand stands for, trusts it, or fits it into their life.
The result was a decade or more of digital distraction. Programmatic buying was optimization, not strategy, and while it ran, marketing stopped answering the prior question of where to play. That is why marketers are less present when the strategic decisions get made.
The measurement problem is not only marketing’s
De Swaan Arons extends the critique to the metrics of capitalism itself. Cutting down a tree raises GDP while leaving it standing does not. Insulating a home lowers GDP, and throwing away food raises it. He credits the observation to Paul Polman and uses it to make a general point: a measure can be precise and still point the wrong way.
Behind that sits the doctrine he holds responsible for fifty years of business practice. Friedman’s position, that a company’s only social purpose is to drive shareholder profit, is quoted directly and treated as the thing the growth study was set up to test.
What the growth study found
The study asked what characterizes growth-outperforming organizations, and only then asked whether marketing’s role differed inside them. The headline result is that multi-stakeholder organizations outperform shareholder-primacy ones on many metrics. The four stakeholder groups are colleagues, community, customers, and capital markets.
The second finding is the one that matters for the function. In those same organizations marketers were not being marginalized. They were increasing their influence by partnering inside and outside the company. The mechanism is straightforward: once a chief executive commits to creating value for every stakeholder, someone has to establish what those stakeholders actually need, and that is marketing’s trained skill.
The Da Vinci growth leader
The profile was developed with the executive search firm Spencer Stuart, and it goes beyond marketing. Most people credit Da Vinci with being both artist and scientist, which makes him whole-brained. De Swaan Arons argues that is not sufficient. The less known fact is that he was a founder of the humanism movement, and the third quality is empathy.
The precondition for any of it is presence. If you are not at the table you cannot influence what happens there. His instruction to marketers who want strategic weight is to think and act like a strategic business leader before expecting to be treated as one.
Creativity as a commercial variable
Two examples anchor the argument that technology alone is not enough. Airbnb confirmed that shifting away from programmatic toward brand communication worked well for it. A major brewer elevated creativity to a strategic priority and took five years to reach a record number of Cannes Lions alongside record growth. De Swaan Arons states the rule bluntly: technology without creativity runs dry very quickly.
The case for the discipline, made to young people
Marketing has a recruitment problem, and de Swaan Arons accepts the reason for it. Young people see a discipline that sells things nobody needs. His counter-argument is behavioral scale. Tide moved millions of people to wash at a lower temperature, and Colgate got people to turn the tap off while brushing, which addresses the largest part of that company’s footprint.
His advice to a marketer starting out is about posture. Act like a CEO from day one. He describes his own first product, a small coffee creamer line, as a company he ran: he dealt with production, innovation, and buyers, and the framing itself was what made the job inspiring.
Generalists in a specializing world
The agency and technology landscape has fragmented into specialisms that do not talk to each other. De Swaan Arons does not argue against specialists. He argues that someone has to make the pieces fit, and that strategic brand management and growth leadership are by definition that generalist role. The test of whether responsibilities have been split well is whether every piece still aligns to one strategy and one view of where the world is going.
The next research follows the same question into the boardroom. A study with the University of Oxford, working title achieving humanized impact, will go back to the chief executives who signed the stakeholder declaration and ask which initiatives worked. One early lesson he offers is to deliver community work through employees, because it builds pride and brand affection at the same time.
Scope and limitations
This is a conversation, not a paper. The growth study’s findings are described in speech and the underlying method is not presented here beyond the number and type of interviews. Readers wanting the evidence are directed to the study itself.
De Swaan Arons is careful about what he claims caused what. He declines to attribute the Business Roundtable’s change of statement to his own research, crediting an investor’s public position instead. The follow-up study is described as work in progress with a working title, and he states his own expectation of its result while saying he is keeping an open mind.
The source is an automatic caption track of speech. It carries no speaker labels, and names of people, brands, and companies are frequently mistranscribed in it.
Source
This page summarises Humanized Growth: A Blueprint For Marketing with Marc de Swaan Arons, by Marc de Swaan Arons.