This keynote opens a panel on sustainable growth at Oxford’s Future of Marketing Initiative. Marc de Swaan Arons uses it to make a case about the role of business in sustainability first, and marketing’s role within that second. He starts from a problem in his own discipline: the flow of people into marketing is declining.
The complaint runs at both ends of the profession. Junior entrants describe marketing as selling things people do not need. Four years earlier, a room of the world’s most senior chief marketing officers turned into what he calls a group therapy session about their loss of influence on business growth.
Key findings
- The research finding behind the talk is a single sentence: businesses that are outperforming define growth in multi-stakeholder terms. The work was done by IRG in collaboration with the Future of Marketing Initiative from the start.
- Shareholder primacy is dated to Friedman in the 1970s, and stated in its strongest form: the only social responsibility of a company is to drive profitability.
- The corporate statement changed only when the largest institutional shareholder asked for more than financial projections. Chief executives rewrote the purpose of the corporation statement in under a year, after 50 years of the previous one.
- The claim de Swaan Arons makes for the profession is reach: marketers touch more people than any other discipline, and shape how those people think, feel, and act.
- Marketing leaders who take on stakeholder work report gaining influence, according to IRG’s own program participants.
The long view on what business was for
De Swaan Arons goes back to Adam Smith, whose ideas of freedom of choice and the invisible hand still shape practice. The premise was that individuals pursuing their own utility would leave everyone better off. A century later Alfred Marshall defined economics as the attainment of well-being, out of concern for the working class.
Companies once behaved accordingly, and the reason was proximity rather than virtue. You built a factory expecting to be there for 75 years. You did not pollute the water because you drank it. He notes the same pattern in American company towns of the period, so this is not a European idea.
His objection to Smith is one of scale. The invisible hand assumed millions of small firms making individual choices, not industrial concentration or a handful of visible hands controlling an economy. It also assumed people would guide companies twice over, as consumers and as citizens. That failed, he argues, because companies began lobbying for short-term interests.
What the metrics reward
The dashboard is the evidence he offers that something is wrong. Under GDP a dead tree is worth more than a live one. Insulating a home counts against it. When those are the guiding measures, he argues, the direction of travel is already set.
The counter-movement is traced through familiar names. Bill Gates called for a change in how capitalism runs, and Porter introduced shared value, which begins to reach multi-stakeholder value creation. De Swaan Arons argues none of it moved practice, because chief executives held that their shareholders wanted profit alone.
Why the marketing function is the answer to the CEO’s problem
The pivot in the argument is the implication of the new commitment. When chief executives said they would create value for all stakeholders, they implicitly took on the question of what moves those stakeholders and what their unmet needs are. Those are the questions marketing is trained to answer.
He lists what the function contributes in practice. Marketers bring the outside world in. They work with people leaders on the employee proposition. They build communities, and they hold consistency across every touchpoint for every stakeholder because they already run channels.
The crisis he described also had one useful effect. The brands clear on their purpose moved fastest during it, and read as genuine, because they knew what they stood for.
Brand growth and SDG growth as one objective
The proposal is specific rather than aspirational. Pursue brand growth, and take a sustainable development goal as the secondary objective of the same work. De Swaan Arons argues every brand can find such a pairing.
His examples cover thinking, feeling, and doing. A condiment brand addresses food waste, in a market where he says half of all food is wasted. A chocolate brand pushed a whole industry to confront child labor in its supply chain. Behavior change covers eating less beef, turning off the tap, and washing at lower temperatures. He treats all of these as brand growth and goal-directed growth at once.
The talk closes on recruitment as much as strategy. A discipline that touches billions of lives and moves how they think, feel, and act is a career worth choosing. His challenge to the room is a question: if not now, when, and if not marketing, who.
Scope and limitations
This is a short scene-setting keynote before a panel, not a presentation of evidence. The research is summarized in a single sentence about how outperforming businesses define growth, and the speaker says he cannot summarize the underlying work here.
The claim about influence is self-reported by participants in IRG’s own program, and is presented as such. The food waste figure and the examples of brands are cited in speech without sources. The source is an automatic caption track, with no speaker labels and frequent mistranscription of names.
Source
This page summarises Oxford University Future of Marketing Initiative: Marc de Swaan Arons on sustainable business growth, by Marc de Swaan Arons.