In two of my integrated marketing courses this past semester I briefed the students to analyze, research and critique a marketing trade press article by Mastercard’s CMO Rajamanarr. In the article, the presumably richly compensated marketer complains about the existential plight of the contemporary CMO. It’s an embarrassing whinge, voiced by an executive who made it to the top of their profession only to find themselves feeling perilously exposed. To his strategic rescue came fifty 22-year-old first year master’s candidates who demonstrated that one CMO’s challenge turns out to be a bunch of grad students A plus papers.
Where Rajamannar is threatened by his perceived loss of control suffered by the death of his cherished 4 P’s and AIDAS funnel (seriously, what the fuck?!…), the instinctive scholars offer a range of startling ideas, from the common sense to the truly expansive. Insights, strategies and tactics which could be organized under the general call to abolish the traditional silo of marketing responsibilities and replace it with a new marketing-first business culture. A cross enterprise re-engineering of the marketing imperative, infusing it within every discipline group, briefing everybody to drive marketing value through their operative and productive business behavior. In a word, own it, people – all of it,
One of the trends Rajamannar bemoans is the theft of traditional CMO remits by the newly minted C-levels of chief revenue officer, chief growth officer and chief customer officer. This executive team strategy has been going on for some time, and Steve Heisler’s diagnosis from his piece for the American Marketing Association in April 2020 points to the absurd if accurate reason why –
“Ultimately, the changing titles speak to a symptom of the larger issue: Companies have yet to truly grasp what it is the CMO is supposed to do, and they’re changing the name in the hopes of achieving that clarity.”
According to the opportunistic insights suggested by my strategically creative master’s students, companies don’t need to change their CMO’s title or job description – they need to change everyone else’s.
I teach another grad class in Competitive Strategy and I assign a quirky text by Prahalad and Ramaswamy inelegantly titled The Future of Competition Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. Most of their cases are nostalgically irrelevant, but their founding theme as business brief is as radical now as it was in their ancient 2004 first edition – open or perish. My favorite case is about a modest chemical company (Buckman Chemical) whose CEO decides the way to stop worrying about his competitors is to simply start behaving as a company in ways that none of them would ever dream of behaving. In Buckman’s case, it is the re-imagining of the company’s culture around a single imperative: knowledge sharing. Obsessive levels of knowledge sharing amongst themselves, across even the most disparate operating teams, and with their broader stakeholders – prospects, customers, partners, suppliers and distributors. Buckman mandates everyone associayed with the business open knowledge connections to each other and keep them open. Explaining the radical policy shift, Prahalad succinctly nails the unique competitive strategy, grounded in a transformed knowledge culture which includes opening up flows of knowledge sharing in everyone’s revised job description –
“In the competitive space the challenge for an organization is to scale the locus of the knowledge environment to collaborate across the enhanced competency base of company and consumers while simultaneously orienting the creation of new knowledge around consumer-to-company interactions.”
This elevation of knowledge as the value currency connecting a company to itself and its customers is one of the winningest marketing strategies yet imagined by any 21st century business. It’s also a posterchild model for our marketing everywhere mandate – everyone is responsible for marketing. We’re all marketeers now?! … you might protest, but I say why the fuck not. How else could we possibly achieve the sufficient levels of day-to-day disruption called for by Prahalad and Ramaswamy challenging us towards a more business behavior which, “…discards the artificial distinctions among enterprises and households.”
In the holacratically flat and open business architecture of early days Zappos, this feels possible when 60% of your internal stakeholders are call center workers. Those workers have direct lines – phone, chat and email – connecting the enterprise into peoples’ households. But how might we charge traditionally non-customer facing workers like business analysts, IT directors, product assemblers, and warehouse workers with doing marketing when their daily tasks place them a million miles away from the actual human they serve with their value-making?
In our act up insight, we find a subversively empowered Patagonia product assembler stitching a “vote the assholes out” message into the waist tag on some $100 cargo shorts. But we all can’t be Patagonia (or can we?…). But what if every company decided to rewire everyone’s job description and compensation package to enable everyone to enjoy meaningful and productive contact with its external human audiences? Imagine product designers unleashed four days a month from the R&D lab to wander the malls, streets, clubs, coffee shops and schools, connecting with people actually using and consuming the products of their labors. What if we did the same with our business analysts and financial forecasters. How about embedding a percentage of our warehouse and shipping workers directly into community centered workshops, garages and transport hubs. What if the covid-driven shift to remote working was tweaked to kick all knowledge workers out from their work-from-home zooms twice a month into the fuzzily defined public spaces not named work.
The reigning conservativism of a typical Fortune 1000 management team would dismiss such steps towards everyone owning value outcomes as inefficient lunacy, Current state management theorists, focusing almost exclusively on shareholder value creation, would mock such radical re-distribution of enterprise-wide responsibility for how a business behaves as the becoming of our marketing as a utopic dream.
Yet cracks of hope open up onto cases of companies stepping off into such previously unimaginable territory of risk and responsibility. Cases like everyone’s (sentimental) favorite candy company Mars, and their unexpected business behavior of October of 2021.
Photo credit BusinessGreem.com October 2021
Mars CEO Grant Reid made headlines a month ahead of what would turn out to be a disastrously ineffectual COP26 conference this past October, pre-emptively announcing Mars’ commitment to owning responsibility for getting to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Uniquel among candy and almost every other multinational food company, Reid said their plan was to own it all – not just Mars facilities and operations zeroing out net carbon but also, “…all those created by its suppliers and emissions from consumers using its brands.”
Cocoa farming in West Africa (pic Ben Rotthoff/Koa)
That first part of Mars commitment regarding suppliers is a considerable lift and many companies don’t have the strategic or ethical bravery to commit as much. That last part about owning the emissions from consumers using its brands is pure off-the-charts business aspiration. Would this include how they dispose of, re-use or maybe even consume the 2030 Twixt wrappers?
Making such bold commitments to take responsibility of the entirety of its supply chain – from growing and processing, to production and distribution, right down to the consumption and voiding – for a company like Mars is a big fucking deal, if they’re serious and deliver. But wait, there’s more says the Guardian coverage of Reid’s announcement –
The company also pledged to:
- Eliminate deforestation in its supply chain
- Link executive pay to cutting greenhouse gas emission
- Challenge its 20,000+ suppliers to take climate action and set meaningful targets.
In an op-ed for the Guardian, Reid said too many corporations were making “net zero” promises that do not cover the whole of their emissions and this state of affairs threatened to undermine the concept of net zero – which he believes is vital if the world is to deal with climate change.
“All too often key components are missing, and that will create a meaningful shortfall in our collective effort to prevent the worst impacts of climate change,” wrote Reid. “The old ways of doing business will not deliver the changes required.
“Failing to fill the gaps that exist in some current net zero commitments will undermine their credibility, and even more importantly, the climate action movement. We can’t allow that to happen.”
… Mars has also committed to freezing its land footprint, expanding its business using only land it uses already.
Parkin (the company’s chief sustainability officer) said there was no underestimating the scale of the challenge ahead. “The scientific consensus is that it will be very hard to get to net zero in agriculture. Perhaps the hardest sector,” he said. “You have got to revolutionize farming practices and that’s about one farmer at a time.”
“That’s indicative of the world, of our challenge, we need every company to step up,” he said. He added that Mars was working with other companies and its suppliers to speed up that process.
All of this bluster is just that, unless and until a company like Mars – its managers, growers, processors, scientists, quality controllers, technologists, packagers and retailers – start behaving in such a way that makes it come true. Like the chief sustainability officer says, this is about “revolutionizing farming practices and that’s about one farmer at a time.” The only way a $40 billion private company which has been quietly making and selling candy since 1911, can possibly achieve this degree of owning it all is if just about everybody in the business gets it, and here’s the key part, gets their role in achieving it. Owning it all, when it comes to such extreme visions means owning the outcomes, good or bad. When a business decides it’s going to be on the hook for such a publicly impactful global outcome, it tends to focus the behavior. And that behavior becomes the new all-enterprise marketing of a company like Mars.
The big complaint from Mastercard’s Rajamannar, a $15 billion public company, was all the other C-levels stole his brief. So be it, as far companies like Mars are concerned where the remit now rolls from everybody in the supply chain up to the newly created chief sustainability officer. If, as we imagine, the brave new marketing function is like water waving and sluicing up and down, through and across the very operational flood tide of an enterprise and all of its stakeholders, maybe making someone named the chief sustainability officer in charge of us all wouldn’t be such a bad thing. As long as everyone dots to her.
As I write in November of 2021, COP26 has ended and any analyst, activist or citizen paying attention has realized the global leaders gathered in Glasgow, fist bumped, partied, made the right noises and then ultimately blinked. Nothing radical was proposed or agreed and the net-net is they will all return to their parliaments, boardrooms and presidential suites to continue fiddling while the habitable environment for their kids’ kids burns to the ground.
What’s clear is that nothing will happen until customers and voters make it happen by their actions on the ground, in the streets, in the stores and – if they still have the stomach – in their voting booths. What if companies were to unleash and amplify the committed power of their stakeholders as a new marketing in the time of catastrophe? Following Mars, maybe make someone like a chief sustainability officer run point. What would that world of owning it all look like?…
In the mid-aughts, the great predatory platform now known as Alphabet famously offered their employees a version of 3M’s 1948 “15% project”, where employees could spend 20% of their time on the company clock working on a pet project. The catch was that those pet projects were all meant to selfishly serve as a feeder track to the Google products pipeline. For at least a half generation, companies have been encouraging their employees – sometimes on, but mostly off the clock to volunteer in the community. The great bloated neoliberal feel-good machine, the United Way, has successfully monetized this faux community service, but that’s not what we’re imagining. In a 2021 article from HBR Jessica Rodell advises bigbox HR leaders to consider the pitfalls and opportunities of squeezing in some employee community service, again but with a twist, mostly in a self-serving capacity e.g. workers who volunteer are more productive!… But, yeah, no – that’s not quite what we have in mind.
What if a company decides to take a chunk of their advertising and measured media budgets and spends it instead on crediting their workers for taking a day each week to hit their local streets and work to fix their own little corner of the world on the company’s dime? Let them don a company branded t-shirt, hoodie or rally cap and spend Wednesdays reading to at-risk kids in after school programs, helping feed and run errands for elders, counseling the drug addled, cleaning clothes for the unhoused, picking plastic and aluminum from the watershed…
Owning it all implies we, the owners, directors, shareholders and stakeholders of a company are no longer simply taking responsibility for keeping our little remit of the gathering Armageddon secure and unlethal enough to last another quarter. It’s saying we’re all responsible for everything now. And we’re gonna take all that money we once wasted on advertising budgets, agencies, extractive AI, overpaid marketing execs and their fatuous strategy consultants like me and instead just spend it on employee time: saving the world as the new marketing. Everyone owning everything like our lives depended on it because they do.