Written to mark the fifth annual IRG100 program, this perspective sets out what businesses need from marketing and challenges chief marketing officers to take responsibility for helping their companies drive more humanized growth.
The title comes from a practice inside the program. Participants define their Ikigai, described as the sweet spot between what they love, what they are good at, what they get paid for, and what the world needs from them.
Key findings
- Seventy-eight percent of IRG respondents agree 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.
- The argument for timing is that disruption has aligned two things that used to be separate. What the world needs now fully correlates with what marketers can offer.
- The financial case is stated alongside the moral one. Meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals is claimed to unlock trillions in value and create hundreds of millions of jobs within the decade.
- The closing reframe is a change of subject rather than a change of tactic: from losing influence to taking responsibility.
The case against marketing, five years on
The piece begins by conceding the criticism. Five years earlier there was extensive discussion of marketing’s declining reputation and receding influence, some companies replaced their chief marketing officers with chief growth officers, Harvard Business Review ran a set of articles on the trouble with the role, tenure fell again, and less than half of directors felt confident describing how marketing added value.
The rebuttal is that conditions changed. Winning marketers are increasing their influence by helping companies move from shareholder primacy to multi-stakeholder value creation, and the specific contribution named is providing a window into the world so that stakeholder needs are better understood.
Two examples are given of what that understanding surfaced: a growing need for human connection among colleagues, and increased demand for open dialogue among community stakeholders.
How the shift built up
The history offered starts in 2008, when Bill Gates argued at Davos for what he called conscious capitalism. The obstacle described is that chief executives were sympathetic but said they could not move toward a broader definition of value creation without their investors’ blessing.
That blessing is dated to 2018 and the annual chief executive letter from BlackRock’s Larry Fink, which demanded that companies with BlackRock investment make a positive contribution to society. The US Business Roundtable responded with a new statement on the purpose of the corporation.
Since then, the piece argues, Davos has moved further toward a sustainable business agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals have entered business language worldwide. Its own framing of that history is that the rest is not history but the future.
Why marketing specifically
The claim for the function rests on difficulty. Humanized growth begins with understanding the impact an organization has on all stakeholders, and the piece is explicit that this will be hard work, because building an insightful understanding of all stakeholder needs is challenging and creating value propositions against those unmet needs is harder still.
The argument is that this is exactly what the function is built for. Those are described as the fundamental capabilities of marketing, which is where chief marketing officers can help their chief executives and C-suite colleagues deliver a more humanized growth strategy.
Three brand examples show the double outcome the piece is after: a beauty brand growing while working on women’s self-esteem, a bank improving mental wellbeing, and a detergent removing stains while persuading people to wash at a lower temperature.
The challenge it ends on
The piece invokes Paul Polman’s description of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals as the business plan for the planet, and argues that marketers have the right experiences, skills, capabilities and attitudes to deliver against it.
Two rhetorical challenges frame the ending. If not now, then when. And if not you, then who. The evidence offered that it is already working is the survey pair: seventy-eight percent reporting a shift toward humanized growth and sixty-five percent reporting increased influence on business strategy.
Scope and limitations
This is a signed perspective from IRG’s founders rather than a research report. Both statistics come from IRG’s own respondents and program participants, and are self-reported.
Source
This page summarises The Ikigai of Marketing: A Perspective on 2024, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, 2024.