Marketing as love
When most people think of marketing, there’s a tinge of something sleazy, something that isn’t right about the world. I’ve heard countless people say, “I don’t like to promote myself. I don’t want to be one of those guys on LinkedIn.” Marketing is one of the subjects that comes up when we talk about the ills of the world. Wendell Berry, for example, blames marketing for excessive consumerism. I get it.
Marketing can “work” by tricking our psychology using fear, uncertainty, and doubt, the holy trinity of our profession. If you’ve read a behavioral economics book, you know what I’m talking about. By the way, Charlie Munger once asked, “If economics isn’t behavioral, what the hell is it?” That’s because human beings are multi-dimensional—we are Homo economicus while at the same time we’re Homo sapiens and Homo anxius.
Marketing is part of our multi-dimensional nature. We’re communicative, social creatures. Selling, telling stories, and self-promoting is like breathing. Marketing is just the industry that’s formed around that native impulse. That’s the base case for the profession.
The growth case is that marketing can be a true, good, and beautiful human activity aimed in the service of love.
We as marketers can love our clients by deeply understanding their beatific vision for their business, the challenges standing in the way of realizing that vision, and helping others come to know that vision in a way that honors the leaders and the unit economics of the firm.
On the other side of the table, we marketers can love our clients’ audiences by translating the vision into a comprehensible story depending on the medium or channel in which they’re receiving it, told in a way that honors their time, attention, and dignity.
In the midst of that translation, we marketers can love ourselves by honing our craft, our attention to the details, our problem-solving brains that find fulfillment in a challenge, in the story, in the dignity of pursuing a career that honors our time on earth to make a living for our families.
Marketing after all is simply communicating the right story to the right person in the right way, the result of which is a healthy, growing, flourishing business. The client can be loved as much as the audience receiving it and as much as the team crafting the material to serve the needs of all parties involved.
Marketing, in other words, can be a great and glorious thing to do, an honorable activity to love and serve our neighbors. Framed that way, bringing a vision to life ain’t a bad way to live.
