The Boss of You

I was delighted to read Seth Godin’s latest blog post, “Is Marketing Evil?” on the bus to work this morning — heck, I was charmed by the title alone, seeing as how Godin is an amazing marketer and I love people who can laugh at how others perceive them. We devoted a large chunk of The Boss of You to marketing, and a decent percentage of those pages are musings on how to market your wares without selling your soul to the devil.

I agree with Godin’s conclusion:

For me, marketing works for society when the marketer and consumer are both aware of what’s happening and are both satisfied with the ultimate outcome.

He sets out some ethical guidelines as well, which mostly have to do with not using marketing to persuade people to do stuff that’s bad for them and/or for society as a whole. But beyond those ethical baselines, he’s arguing for transparency:

Marketing has more reach, with more speed, than it has ever had before. With less money, you can have more impact than anyone could have imagined just ten years ago. The question, one I hope you’ll ask yourself, is what are you going to do with that impact?

[...] Just because you can market something doesn’t mean you should. You’ve got the power, so you’re responsible, regardless of what your boss tells you to do.

The good news is that I’m not in charge of what’s evil and what’s not. You, your customers and their neighbors are. The even better news is that ethical, public marketing will eventually defeat the kind that depends on the shadows. Just ask Bernie Madoff.

This is a smart way to look at the ethics of marketing in our current cultural reality: You can look at business as a fast-buck opportunity, and pour a ton of energy into tricking people out of their money — or you can build an ever-widening community of customers, vendors and prospects where your relationships with them are based on trust, shared values and mutual interests. You might be able to get away with the former in the short term, but taking a longer view, the latter is where the smart money is. The relationships you forge are deeper and longer-lasting, and can withstand the occasional hiccup or mistake; but furthermore, as more and more business is conducted online, there is a real risk that unethical business practices will not only come back to bite you in the ass, but they could actually damage your reputation in far-reaching ways.

What Godin’s post encapsulates for me bears a close kinship to something I hear a lot amongst the social media / Web 2.0 crowd, i.e. that trust and transparency are increasingly central to business relationships. Customers are looking to companies to prove their trustworthiness by providing them with open access to information, timely and attentive service, and evidence that they value the input and feedback of their customers. In other words, we want real relationships with the real people behind the brands.

This shifts the conversation about marketing in a fundamental way, because rather than getting distracted by the individual tools in the marketer’s toolkit — magazine ads, billboards, blogs, email newsletters, etc. etc. — we can focus on the deeper goal, which is to create meaningful relationships. Starting from that seed point, we can branch out into the specifics of how those relationships can be forged and nourished. Marketing becomes a more holistic process, one that reaches to the roots of how you run your business.

It’s incredibly exciting to me to see how this is going to pan out for the values-driven, “small is beautiful” businesses for whom we wrote our book, because a lot of the entrepreneurs we spoke to are people who seek out those same qualities in their relationships with their customers, and who strive to embody their best values in every aspect of their personal and business lives. But we’ve also heard a lot of resistance to self-promotion, in part because some of us associate “marketing” with white-washing, or even downright deception. The fact is that marketing need not — in fact, should not — involve anything that makes you feel sleazy or dishonest, or that misleads, manipulates, or insults the intelligence of your target audience. And if you can focus on the relationship with your customer, and on building mutual trust with them, you won’t go far wrong.