Everything everywhere. Story of Marketing. Read all about it.
Understanding the world through other eyes will empower marketers to find the patterns.
I argued the best definition is that Marketing is responsible for everything outside an enterprise’s physical walls and digital domains. I noted what psychologist Daniel Goleman identified as the critical ability: "pattern recognition, the big-picture thinking that allows leaders to pick out the meaningful trends from a welter of information around them and to think strategically far into the future.”
Where is that 'welter of information' to be found?
I've read everything I've found about marketing from the "greats". But in recent times that shelf on the library became thinly populated as the story became not about marketing but about big technology and digital platforms.
The evolution of marketing doyen Philip Kotler is in itself worthy of a book. Kotler's journey has taken him from 'Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning and Control" (first edition 1967) to Confronting Capitalism: Solutions for a Troubled Economic System (2015).
Kotler once envisioned marketing as a management system through which the firm could control its market and customers. Fifty years later he explains how control is no longer (if ever) feasible. He tells us we must understand not only the whole economic system in which the firm operates, but further asks us to question the goals and metrics within that system. First, he questions the economic orthodoxy with its sole metric of shareholder value. Further, he touches on big picture issues including equality (the concern of sociologists), motivations (the concern of psychologists), data (the concern of technologists), and privacy (the concern of the law and regulators).
Our take-out from Kotler's confrontations must be that firms operate within a complex ecosystem, systems dynamics is the critical methodology for firms to map the ecosystem, and a consilience of knowledge across domains is urgent.
And here we come to the essential meaning of the rapid and dizzying advancements in silicon chip design and manufacturing, of cloud computing, and of the LLM's (the large language models that are the first output of so-called 'AI').
The shift in marketing and advertising to digital and programmatic resulted when digital platforms consolidated numeric digital data for quantitative analysis and modeling. Now big tech's LLM's are consolidating language, text and video-based digital data for a new breed of models that are both qualitative and quantitative.
The narrow application of these models will be to tune marketing tactics, from personalization to creativity and production. The wider and strategic application of these models will be to enable marketers to connect with other domains and (with consent) share data with them to build the big picture of markets as systems. Marketing analysts will be able to build a new generation of 'Marketing Mix Models' (for which we need a new name) that integrate economic, ecological and societal data.
The inputs to these models will include not only the activities of the firm but the external costs to the environment, and the societal costs measured in well-being, of these activities.
And these models will focus not only on sales and profit output metrics, but on a multiple set of measures including long-term brand value, societal well-being and environmental sustainability.
The twelve books I recommend are not only informative and fascinating in their own right, but they confront (as Kotler realized) a system increasingly dominated by monopoly and technology that is no longer 'fit for purpose'.
Recommended by LinkedIn
I first highlight Power, because big technology dominates marketing today. Yet it is obvious as well as simplistic to recommend that every brand's strategy should be to wean itself off digital platforms (see the rare successes at Nike and Airbnb in doing so). A younger generation of strategists like Zoe Scaman advance new theses, advocating the power of community. I worry only that they may remain wedded to tech platforms, albeit those like Roblox Games less exploitative.
The two books on Power I recommend here are by philosophers who look forward to potential futures in which technology under the rubric of AI will threaten everything that is wonderful about the combination of art and science that makes up marketing.
They sound a warning. Marketers can envision and participate in a different future.
Stewart Pearson
Stewart believes in Consilience, the unity of knowledge across disciplines. He has lived, worked, and traveled globally in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. He has settled in the Evergreen State and Seattle. After studying Statistics and Marxist Economics in the U.K. he had four decades of experience in marketing and advertising focused on building client brands directly and globally. He was Global Chief Client Officer and Vice-Chairman of Wunderman, then the fastest-growing major agency in WPP. David Ogilvy once sent him a telex from India and Lester Wunderman told him stories of Picasso from the village in France where both of Stewart’s heroes had lived. Stewart is on LinkedIn and Twitter, and at scotthebrave@live.com.