Last week, I made the case that a company exists to serve people, that long-term shareholder value is the outcome of doing that well, and that the CMO and Marketing have a huge opportunity to help the business get there.
This week, I want to go back to where Marketing2030 actually started, a year ago, with a question that sounds simple but isn’t: What kind of world are we asking Marketing leaders to help the business navigate and grow in?
When we started Marketing2030, we did what any research team does first. We read. In fact, we read a lot: more than 250 studies and reports from the past year, from strategy consultancies, industry bodies, technology companies, and the business press, looking for the political, economic, social, and technological forces every company will have to plan around. We expected a list of trends. What we found instead was a set of contradictions.
Every force we could identify was counterbalanced by another of equal strength. Scale against local identity. Speed against stability. Machine against human. Personalization against privacy. Digital convenience against the human need to be in a room with other people. And underneath all of them, the one I wrote about last week: the tension of performance and value creation in the quarter against the decade.
We called them the M2030 Growth Paradoxes and published them in November as the first Marketing2030 report, ‘Winning in a Polarized World’. There are six. I won’t go through all of them in detail; you can download the full report here, but I do want to give you the shape of each, because the rest of M2030 only makes sense against them.
The six growth paradoxes
Short-term and long-term
Every public company, and many private ones, lives under pressure to show results now, and the rise of performance marketing with immediate payback has made the argument for brand investment harder to win. But it’s too simple to say this is shareholders versus everyone else. Plenty of shareholders think in decades, and plenty of employees and customers want something today. This paradox is more complex and very real on both sides of the table.
Global and local
Businesses spent 30 years globalizing everything from supply chains to brand campaigns. Now, regional regulation, nationalism, and interest-based online communities are pulling organizations back in the other direction. Nearly half of consumers in a recent study said that being locally owned positively influences their purchase decisions. Scale still matters, in fact, more than ever. So does being from somewhere.
Agility and stability
Leaders are told to transform constantly, but many feel they cannot keep up with either the technology or the geopolitics. Their people feel it more. Many of the CMOs we talk to tell us their teams are tired of transformation, and some even say ‘scared’. This is clearly not conducive to big thinking and innovation. Over 80% of citizens across 50 markets say the world is moving too fast, and 87% of consumers say they’d pay more for a brand they trust. The faster everything moves, the more valuable it is to create the safety and space to reflect, to be the thing that holds still.
Human and machine
AI delivers speed, scale, and cost efficiencies that no business can or should ignore, and most companies are already cutting the jobs that machines can do more cheaply. At the same time, most people still want the spontaneity and originality that only comes from another human being. AI is trained on what already exists. Originality, creativity, and empathy, by definition, aren’t.
Personalization and privacy
Delivering the right thing to the right person at the right moment has been Marketing’s holy grail for decades, and algorithms can now often anticipate a need before the person has consciously formed it. That’s precise and valuable, but it is often uninvited as well. The businesses that win here will be the ones people choose to let in, not the ones that force their way through the door.
Digital and personal connection
The most basic act of one person connecting with another has been substituted, at scale, by a screen. It satisfies real needs but can also feed an epidemic of loneliness, first among the young, and increasingly among the old. Every consumer journey now has to be seamless and digital, and every business has to decide where it will pay for a human to be present.
These are the M2030 Growth Paradoxes, and here’s the objection I expect, because I raised it myself when I first saw the list: none of these are new. Any CMO could have named all of them, or at least most of them. That’s true, but what was new to us was hearing senior leaders describe experiencing all six at once, sometimes in the same day, with no agreed way to decide between them.
The old assumptions about how to run a global business are dissolving, with no clear alternative in sight. One CMO called it whiplash. Several used the word “confused,” which, I find, is not a term CMOs often use to describe themselves publicly.
The second objection is that a report called ‘Winning in a Polarized World’ may give the impression that it’s only about politics. And it clearly isn’t. Polarization here is a market condition, like inflation or a currency shift. Your customers, your colleagues, and your regulators live in it whether or not your company ever says a word about it, and a business that can’t see that is flying blind. Understanding how people really live their lives, what they think, feel, and do, is not about taking a political position. But we believe that it is an important part of the Marketing job to be the Window on the World for the organization. More about that later.
What I find hugely encouraging is how these growth paradoxes affect the case for Humanized Growth. Every one of them is, at bottom, a tension between something efficient and something human, and every one of them is resolved by holding both. That is exactly the balance the growth leaders in our research are learning to strike, and it’s why the businesses that grow fastest are the ones that face these forces rather than look away from them. In fact, in the Marketing2030 online survey, 71% of leaders at companies outperforming in revenue growth named AI and new technology as one of the most important challenges they are actively addressing. Among the underperformers, it was just 39%.
So, I believe one question worth asking your leadership team this week is: which of these six growth paradoxes are we currently treating as a choice when it’s actually a balance?
What comes next
Looking forward, the paradoxes describe the world as it is today. They don’t tell a Marketing leader what to do about it. That’s where M2030 went next, and where this series goes next.
Next week, I will review the learning covered in the M2030 Phase Two report: what more than 350 CEOs, CMOs, and board members on five continents told us about the Marketing strategy, structure, and capabilities that the winners share. The week after, I will focus on the kind of CMO leadership it takes to act effectively on all of it, and then, I will proudly share highlights from the official global launch in Istanbul.
My Best,
Marc de Swaan Arons