Conscious Marketing

How to Create an Awesome Business with a New Approach to Marketing

Carolyn Tate

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780730309673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

In the modern economy, businesses must have heart

The marketing industry is broken. Consumers are tired of interruption, push, mass media and the manipulation of marketing and advertising generally. They want to deal with honest, ethical companies that have heart and purpose and that care about serving all their stakeholders instead of their pockets. Conscious Marketing proves that marketing can really work if the paradigm is shifted—radically. In Conscious Marketing: How to Create an Awesome Business With a New Approach to Marketing, author Carolyn Tate demonstrates just how beneficial this shift can be. By practising the four tenets of conscious marketing, companies can raise their brand's profile and attract customers for life. The book shows how building a business with a higher-purpose can lead to sustainability, profitability and industry leadership. Conscious marketing works for both multinational corporations and cash-strapped small business alike.

In the modern market, a business that does well and contributes to the elevation of humanity and the planet attracts the best customers, employees, suppliers and investors. These people evangelize, and the brand reach expands exponentially further and to a more loyal audience than traditional marketing will ever capture. This concept and other topics in the book include:

• What's wrong with marketing and why it doesn't work
• What "conscious" means to the consumer, business, leader and marketer
• The who, what, why and how of conscious marketing
• Navigating the shift from traditional to conscious practices

The book includes a three-part guide to crafting an actionable plan, including where to find help. Marketing doesn't have to be the budgetary dead weight it has become. It can be fun, human and inspiring for everyone involved, but change requires a deep shift in thinking and behaviour that goes way beyond the transaction or the sale. To stay relevant in the modern economy, businesses must show what's at their core, why they do what they do and why it matters. Conscious Marketing is a comprehensive guide to fixing the problem, with a sustainable solution.

PART I
The current state of marketing

Chapter 1
The problem with marketing

Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Oh, if only this were true!

Capitalism is good. It's just that capitalism as we currently know it, is sick and destructive and doing more harm than good to humanity and the planet. Profit is the holy grail of capitalism and it's creating a sick and unhealthy world for our children and future generations to inherit.

It's simply astounding that, according to Oxfam, the world's 100 richest people could alleviate world poverty, not just once but four times over. In America, The New York Times reports that Wall Street bankers can pay themselves $91 billion in bonuses when thousands of people living on poverty wages are being cast out of their homes for being unable to pay the mortgage.

The stakeholders that always win in this game of capitalism are the executives, board members, shareholders and banking analysts, and the self-serving financial institutions that make them dance like puppets. The stakeholders that lose every time are the customers, the staff, the suppliers — and of course broader society and the planet.

Capitalism has created a competitive, dog-eat-dog, ‘you or me' world instead of a ‘we' world. For one stakeholder to win, others must lose.

The single-minded pursuit of profit has turned institutions and the people who run them into sociopaths. There's a cancer in capitalism that's destroying our world. While it might be ‘legal', it's morally and ethically untenable.

If we're going to create a better world for our children, one that truly puts humanity, love and compassion before personal wealth building, power and ego, we'll all have to do our bit to change our own corner of the world.

Conscious marketing is based on the principle that a conscious approach to capitalism and business must prevail.

Marketing is broken

Like capitalism, the world of marketing (and its subset advertising) is deeply broken. It's made us sick, sad, fat, lonely, dumb, numb, stressed, wanting and broke. It's created a society where shopping and accumulating stuff is our daily priority, but the more we consume, the more we need to earn and the more complex and unhappy our lives become.

Today's media bombards us with insidious messages designed to make us all hungry, acquisitive and competitive. It's all about having more — more money, more possessions, more beauty, more assets, more of everything. We've been sold the monumental lie that ‘more is better', but that there's simply not enough to go around so in order for me to have more, you must have less.

Marketers and advertisers have overrun our environment, thrusting their commercial graffiti into our faces at every opportunity in order to manipulate us into buying. There's simply no escape; from the minute we wake up to the minute we go to bed, we're bombarded with it.

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We've been sold the monumental lie that ‘more is better', but that there's simply not enough to go around so in order for me to have more, you must have less.

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While the number of media channels has increased tenfold, the quality of the message seems to have regressed in direct proportion. In any given day we receive more than 3000 marketing messages (that's two per minute). Is it any wonder that people are tuning out and turning off? And if we do tune in, most of what we are fed is predicated on fear, greed and lies whose objective is to manipulate us to buy stuff we don't need. While attacking the competition, advertisers treat us as though we're idiots, making bland promises they simply can't deliver on.

As consumers (an odious word introduced into our language by marketers), we're the victims of unconscious binge marketing. When marketers need to sell more stuff, they simply turn up the volume and frequency of their promotions, adding to the already over-polluted marketing environment.

It feels like everyone is shouting at us.

According to media education website Lessonbucket, it was estimated that in 2011 nearly $500 billion was spent on paid advertising across the world. This figure is expected to reach well over $600 billion in 2015. Multiply that by 10 (very conservatively) to take into account the real cost of the total marketing industry (including the costs of agencies, marketing departments, website development, database systems, printing, search engine optimisation, video production, direct mail and so much more) and you'll understand just how massive this industry really is. Trillions of dollars are spent on promoting, pushing and shoving products and services into our faces.

The overall return on investment, in financial terms, is anybody's guess. The ROI in human terms is far more evident. In short, marketing is contributing to the decay of society.

The marketing model is broken and drastically needs an overhaul. But there is a better way: it's called conscious marketing, and it's what this book is all about.

Before we learn about this brand-new approach to marketing, however, we must lift the lid on what's truly broken in the current model and understand why it's in the precarious state it is. Only then can we unlearn what we've been conditioned to accept both as citizens and as marketers.

If you're a CEO, corporate marketer, entrepreneur, business owner, ad agency professional or marketer (which is probably most of us), this book is for you. If you're a citizen who buys stuff from these people and their companies, this book is also for you. It will inspire you to think twice before you redirect your hard-earned cash to companies that adopt unconscious and harmful business and marketing practices.

It's time to change the marketing paradigm, to reinvent it as a force for good in the world. Viva la (marketing) revolution!

Marketing has been hijacked

Advertising. Selling. Promotions. Campaigns. Social media. Websites. PR. These are the words that define marketing in today's fast-paced business world.

The old definition of marketing was all about the 4 P's — having the right product at the right price in the right place and finally ensuring it was promoted effectively. Advertising, selling, social media, PR — each was just one part of the promotional mix, not what people today believe to be the definition of ‘marketing'. Today that final P, promotion (which includes advertising), drives most businesses. The marketing department's role is simply to promote average products to the masses with smart, creative hooks, using as many media as possible.

Companies and marketers used to take the 4 P's of marketing way more seriously. They used to care about the 4 P's. They used to build outstanding (yet simple) products that truly served their customers and that would make them deliriously happy for the long term. The promotional piece wasn't even considered until the basics of good business and good marketing were taken care of.

For most companies now, good old-fashioned smart marketing is too much like hard work. It's far easier to build a mediocre product fast, add some bells and whistles and discounts to it, and hit the marketplace with a bunch of clever promotions to manipulate people into buying.

Banking is a great example of this crazy notion. Banks by and large operate in a homogeneous, commoditised market with little differentiation between their products, service delivery and online banking facilities. According to a 2010 news article, the Big Four Australian super-banks collectively spend over $1 billion a year on advertising. And don't forget this is just the paid advertising and promotions that can be measured and reported on publicly. It doesn't take into account all the other functions of marketing, such as website builds, mail-outs, PR spin and all the rest of it.

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Marketing as we once knew it has been hijacked by the fourth P, promotion, which is driving most companies in their desperate bid to gain short-term market share and dominate the competition.

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A snapshot of the ads of the big banks reveals celebrity endorsements, promotions to spend more in return for more rewards points, competitor bashing and grandiose announcements of the latest banking awards they've won (seriously, who cares!). At a time when public distrust of banks is at ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I: The current state of marketing
• Part II: The reinvention of marketing
• Part III: Shifting from theory to action
• Conclusion
• Afterword by billy stafford
• The conscious marketing manifesto
• Useful resources for conscious business owners
• Index
• Advert
• EULA