If you had to pick the most damaging sentence ever written about marketing, what would it be? Here's my candidate, from the bible of the discipline, Philip Kotler's Principles of Marketing. 'Marketers should study buyers to find out how they actually evaluate brand alternatives.
If they know what evaluative processes go on, marketers can take steps to influence the buyer's decision.'
It seems innocuous enough; obvious, too. But if marketing's job is to identify and meet consumer wants and needs, what does the consumer want when making a decision? To make a better decision. From the consumer's point of view, anything that influences them away from that destroys value. So, when Kotler tells marketers to influence consumers' decisions in their favour, he is telling them to ignore consumer needs; to destroy consumer value instead.
This is not some trivial oversight or misunderstanding, it's a trillion-dollar tragedy. Armies of people squander huge amounts of time, money, effort and resources 'focusing' on the consumer, generating insights and understanding - not to address their desire for better decisions, but to subvert, divert, obstruct and sabotage them.
Why don't marketers practise what they preach on this score? First, they have a deep, visceral - and understandable - fear: 'What happens if a better decision means choosing my competitor instead of me?' There's only one way to address this and that is to confront it: 'Get used to it. It's called competition.'
Second, much of the persuasion paradigm's attraction lies in marketers' dangerously exaggerated belief in their ability to influence decisions. Many see 'changing consumer attitudes and behaviours' as the pinnacle of good marketing. In fact, marketers' fervent desire for 'influence' has sucked them into a quest for their own version of the philosopher's stone - a secret sauce of persuasion capable of trans-muting lead (autonomous consumers) into corporate gold (obedient brand loyalty). Like the alchemists before them, they will never find this elixir, because it does not exist.
Isn't there extensive, incontrovertible evidence of marketing's ability to influence consumer behaviours? It depends on what you mean by 'evidence'. Yes, there is strong evidence that marketers can influence consumer decisions in short-term and mostly superficial ways. But there is scant evidence that these translate into a long-term ability to influence the evolution of markets or build strong, sustainable brands.
In fact, most metrics of influence do not measure what they purport to measure. Does a promotional sales spike measure marketers' success in changing consumer behaviour, or consumers' success in bending the marketer's prices to their preferences?
And what about the things we fail to measure? Many 'successful' attempts to influence consumer behaviours are successful not because of the marketer's insight and ingenuity, but because of humans' multiple predictable irrationalities. Marketers can take advantage of these in their quest for 'influence', but only at the expense of trust.
For decades, we failed to measure the toxic effects of CO2 emissions; that left us blind to their accumulating damage to earth's climate. Likewise, the long unmeasured toxic effects of the persuasion paradigm generated a climate of pervasive consumer mistrust.
A different rationale
The third obstacle stems from a mistaken belief in 20th-century economics' theories of 'rational' decision-making, which focus attention on supposedly objective calculations of functional benefit, price and so on.
Experienced marketers know this is not how real people behave. Often, emotional costs and benefits loom much larger in consumers' decisions than functional ones. This does not mean consumers are 'irrational'. They still want to make better decisions - where 'better' is both emotional and functional and relates not only to the outcome but also to the content and process. Was the information provided relevant, fit for purpose and trust-worthy? Was the process simple, easy and fun? Did it make me feel safe?
Once we start looking at different consumers' decision-making priorities and preferences, we quickly discover they are as subtle, rich, complex and emotional as their product and service needs. Historically, however, marketing's interest in these needs has been distorted: we have sought insight and understanding, not to help, but to identify and take advantage of weaknesses and to 'influence'.
The fourth obstacle is probably the biggest. For marketers, historically, there have been few commercial incentives to help consumers make better decisions. Practical, mass, scaleable mechanisms for consumers to say 'here I am, this is what I want' did not exist. Nor did marketers' ability to customise information provision to their circumstances. Addressing consumers' needs for better decisions was neither practical nor advantageous. Instead, a powerful combination of available technologies and resulting business models put top-down messaging - 'persuasion' - at the heart of marketing.
Now things are changing, however. Search, social networking, peer reviews, comparison sites - the entire zoo of online phenomena has one thing in common. As new, exclusive research for Marketing by Lightspeed Research suggests, consumers are adopting them en masse because they address the unmet desire to make better decisions.
According to this research, consumers trust independent online sources of information (such as search, peer review or comparisons) far more than retailers or brands, which now risk losing the trust war. Online 'decision support' services are also winning pivotal 'first port of call' status, while, ironically, also gaining influence. More than three-quarters of consumers (77%) say their online research has changed what they have bought; 88% say it has changed where they bought from. It's no longer retailers vs brands - both are losing ground to an upstart.
The big, transformational difference is that these emerging information services are crystallising consumers' long-ignored desire for better decisions into a fully fledged market in its own right: one with its own services and business models delivering their own special value (both the emotional and 'rational' aspects of decision-making), requiring their own special skills, in-sights, processes, delivery mechanisms, relationships and revenue streams.
This is not some trifling nuisance interfering with, or changing the detailed execution of, marketers' main agenda of more effective influence. It is the new value agenda, on its way to becoming the world's biggest market - if only because it subsumes products and services into it (if I can make a better decision, it will lead me to better products or deals anyway). Marketers mesmerised by the persuasion paradigm risk blinding themselves even to the existence of this market.
Google's stellar trajectory is just a tiny foretaste of what is to come. It reveals a new, era-defining dynamic. In the process of researching, evaluating, sifting, comparing and prioritising, consumers are generating vast amounts of fresh, rich, detailed real-time information about who they are, what they want, when and where. Previously, this information evaporated as soon as it was created; it may as well not have existed. Now it can be captured to become a resource that consumers can volunteer and share with marketers - if they see good reason to.
Valuable resource
This information has the ability to unleash rich new win-wins between consumers and marketers. It's information from the horse's mouth about the nature, shape and location of demand. It's a natural fountain of insights into consumers' changing preferences and priorities (helping marketers monitor whether their products and services are competitive before, rather than after, consumers make purchasing decisions). It's a driver of operational efficiency, allowing marketers to talk to the right people about the right things at the right times, rather than shouting at everybody all the time. In short, using it, marketers can identify and deliver greater value at lower cost.
However, consumers won't play the information-sharing game if they believe their data is going to be used against them to make better decision-making harder, rather than easier.
The world has moved on. There are two markets - an information-rich, trust-based market for decision support, and the traditional market for better products and services. Thanks to Kotler, marketing is playing effectively in only one. It's time we moved on.
Alan Mitchell is a respected author and a founder of Ctrl-Shift and Mydex.
Alan.Mitchell@ctrl-shift.co.uk