Can marketing help make the world a better place? #M4BW

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Marketing gets a lot of criticism. Those of us who teach marketing know that good marketing can contribute to a better world. Meeting customers’ needs and wants can help people. That “bright side” of marketing motivates a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Marketing, which, in its call for papers, notes: “Marketing has the power to improve lives, sustain livelihoods, strengthen societies, and benefit the world at large. At the same time, marketing can have a dark side—it has the power to hurt consumers, employees, communities, markets, institutions, and the environment that surrounds us.” Often our students come into our marketing classes thinking about the “dark side.”

Inspired by the Journal of Marketing call for papers, a wide range of reading, and my own optimism about what marketing (and more generally business) can do, I am today starting the first of a series of posts that will be tagged #M4BW (Marketing for a Better World). These posts will highlight brands and businesses that have used marketing to create profits–and made the world a better place. To give you a background, I direct you to a TED Talk by Michael Porter (below). I have shared this with my students to stimulate a discussion about how marketing might contribute to a better world. It provides a nice supplement to our Chapter 1 coverage of value, triple bottom line, ethics, and social responsibility.

Welcome back! and a big thank you…

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Faithful (or occasional, or even first-time) readers of Teach the 4 Ps,

Over the last couple of years I have been pleased to have Jon Firooz as guest editor of Teach the 4 Ps. Jon did a fantastic job providing insightful content and great ideas for teaching marketing. With a lot of other activities on his plate, Jon is unable to continue writing for the blog. Jon was a great help — especially over the last year as I worked hard on revising the 17th edition of Essentials of Marketing. The latest version, which I am now finishing up, will be published this spring. I will drop some nuggets about that in the coming months. That said, having Jon managing the blog during that time was a big help. Thanks Jon!

Let me use that to segue into a welcome back to teaching time. While some of you were teaching this summer, many of us had time away from the classroom. I hope that even if you did teach this summer, you had the chance to get away and re-charge batteries. I don’t usually teach in the summer and when I return to the classroom in the fall I am especially charged up.

As always, feel free to shoot me an email with suggestions or comment on the blog.

Joe Cannon, Professor of Marketing, author, Essentials of Marketing

Millennials are boosting some industries…

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As we point out in Chapter 3, marketing context, including the broader cultural and social environment can bring about threats or opportunities. As Millennials (those born between 1978 and 1994) have more discretionary income, they are being blamed for killing a number of different industries including cereal, department stores, beer, golf, and more (see list here). So this generation is definitely a threat to those industries.

On the other hand, Millennials buying behavior has boosted other industries, see “Coffee, travel, and skincare are among 12 industries millennials are boosting,” Fast Company, September 9, 2019. These examples can be used when you discuss SWOT (Chapter 2), the cultural and social environment (Chapter 3) or segmentation (Chapter 4).

Reebok’s Digital Strategy Change

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Marketing Dive published an article based on an interview they did with Matt Blonder, Reebok’s global head of digital, talking about a major digital facelift and loyalty program revamp he spearheaded over the past year.  In the article, Blonder cites numerous issues with the previous strategy and calls their website an embarrassment.  One of the issues was the fact that their website essentially hadn’t been touched in years.  Another was what he called a “hyper masculine” design.  Blonder said the new strategy includes a major overhaul of the site to make it faster than the previous site, include user generated content, and will incorporate a personalized e-commerce experience.  They’re also launching a new loyalty program and hope the data from that program can feed into their personalized e-commerce engine.  The article talks about how Reebok’s previous decisions had unintentionally excluded women and led to defection to competitors Nike and Lululemon.

Jeff Bezos: ‘Market Research Doesn’t Help’

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Yahoo Finance recently ran the article titled “Jeff Bezos: ‘Market Research Doesn’t Help“.  The catchy title makes it look like Bezos doesn’t believe in the value of market research but that’s not actually what he’s saying.  Bezos’s claim is that market research isn’t always the best source for innovative product design.  When talking about the development of the Amazon Echo family of devices, Bezos said, “If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said ‘Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?’ I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said ‘No, thank you.’”

The article is a short one but it’s point is well taken.  Consumers are generally great improvers but terrible innovators.  If Apple had asked cell phone users in 2007 what they wanted to see in a new phone design they would have described something very similar to the existing models from RIM, Nokia, and others.  Nobody would have suggested a device lets you make calls but also lets you fling brightly colored birds into a pig-infested structure.  With that understanding, ask your students why bother with market research if consumers aren’t good at innovating?  Maybe it’s product research that’s not valid but other forms of market research have value?  Could product research still have value given the issues mentioned?  The answer is yes and it depends a great deal on the process.  Rather than ask people what they want or need, good product researchers will study how people use existing products, what problems they experience, and what opportunities are yet to be addressed.