Archives for September 2019

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).

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.