The Marketing Bureau

Is business, as some greenies, most hippies and a bunch of other groups would have us believe, really nothing more than evil personified? Can we strip away all the trappings of civilisation, go back to being naked in a field and live business-free, money free, lives in bucolic bliss? Brian H Meredith doesn't think so.

As clients, colleagues and others who are unfortunate enough to spend any length of time in my company will know to their cost, I am prone to expounding, postulating and ruminating on the business and marketing concepts and their role, for good or evil, in life.

Not just in business, professional or organisational life, but in LIFE. The Big L. That transient existence of homosapiens on planet Earth. The thing for which meaning was sought by Brian (different Brian) and, no doubt, many others, with varying degrees of resolution.

It seems to me (and what do I know?) that Marketing is, if not the meaning of life (as it most certainly is not), it is undoubtedly one of the key mechanisms of life. Now, before any of you rushes to put pen to paper to protest my sacrilegious heresy, allow me to explain.

In my own humble journey through life I have noted how strong the anti-marketing, anti-business and anti-commercialism attitudes continue to be. Business is itself largely to blame. It does not enjoy great PR as a concept, a pastime or as a way of earning a living. Sales is something that we hope someone else will do and that they will do it to someone other than us. Money is often a dirty word. Profit is commonly held to be the anti-christ of all that is good and wholesome, a word that some spit rather than articulate.

At best, many seem to regard business as a necessary evil. But for many of those people, if they were able to live in a world that was free of this evil scourge, they would buy a ticket like a shot.

So let’s deconstruct this vile, evil, sales infected, profit obsessed world and start again. Let’s draw a line in the sands of our civilisation.

It’s Monday morning and we have wiped the slate clean. Every last one us awakens, naked, somewhere on the planet. Not in a bed or under a roof, but under the stars. Remember, we’ve cleared the decks. There are no nations. No societies. No cities. No infrastructures. No buildings.

There is nothing.

Just the natural world.

And a bunch of unclothed, hairy hominids.

Can we survive?

Of course we can.

How will we do this?

In precisely the same way as our ancestors did. We would find or build rudimentary shelters. We would hunt and kill food. We would procreate.

And on the first day of this re-creation, how long would it be before one of us realised that we lacked some skill or resource needed in order to do something we needed to do in order to satisfy what, thousands of years later, Maslow would include in the base level of his Hierarchy of Needs?

We would, therefore, seek out another of us who could offer those skills or resources. We would agree on a currency and the exchange would take place.

The first commercial transaction of the re-creation has just occurred.

The first example of the marketing concept has been demonstrated. Someone needed something. Someone else was able and willing to provide it. A currency was established and a transaction occurred. Chances are profit was also earned.

We would then begin to slowly construct communities that would develop into societies which, in turn, would consolidate into a civilisation.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Furthermore, throughout the development of history up to today and into the future, and unless something very fundamental in the nature of human existence were to change, the continued existence of the species relies on the four elements. And marketing.

Adam Smith wrote, (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations -1776), “nothing happens until somebody sell something”. Of course, “need” must first be present but I have already demonstrated that “need” emerges in society almost coincidental with its birth.

If that little lot doesn’t place the marketing concept at the centre of LIFE, I don’t know what does.

Marketing is not a verb. It is not a job description. It is not a department.

It is an overarching, all embracing and empowering articulation of one of the great realities of human existence – that part of our existence that must trade in order to survive. It is not optional. It is a necessity. It is a survival mechanism.

Equally, Marketing is not a construct, although the way in which it is understood, articulated and practiced of course gives rise to constructs. Organisations are merely constructs of human beings seeking to bring order to the inevitable need to satisfy need, to manage the survival mechanism.

Everything that an organisation does, every behaviour in which it engages, either contributes to the meeting of need or is irrelevant at best and destructive at worst.

Why does this matter?

It matters simply because marketing organisms need to be managed and nurtured in order to survive and in order to do that, an understanding of the elemental nature of the marketing concept is vital.

For as long as Marketing is defined as “Arresting the human intelligence long enough to extract money from it”, organisations will be guilty, not of engaging in the noble endeavour of trade but, rather, in the ignoble activity of mugging.

It is, arguably, the insistence of too many organisations to perpetuate the “mugging” model that has resulted in the destructively negative perception that so many amongst us have of business, marketing, sales, money and profit.

Brian H Meredith