KAMIST

Modern Marketing for a sustainable future

Hello, OptiMIST People!

Back at it again with KaMIST! Your weekly dose of insights into the latest marketing trends. In this week’s KaMIST we’ll dive into marketing in a sustainable world.

Do you think today’s marketing is compatible with a sustainable future? 

As we all know today, many brands have taken a big step in becoming more sustainable, especially in their production process. With more companies starting to swap their old nonrenewable and non-eco-friendly materials for recycled and renewable materials. However, a number of marketing concepts many companies use are drifting us further from the noble goal brands are striving to achieve in the first place. 

The global Chief Marketing Officer of Dole Sunshine Company, Rupen Desai, argues that many marketing strategies such as premiumization, upsizing, mass consumption, and profit above all else are “incompatible” with a sustainable future. He explains how premiumization, which often means using more packaging to charge higher prices to consumers, and upsizing, a marketing tactic to make consumers feel like they’re getting a good deal by encouraging people to buy more products in larger serves, are both damaging for the planet and the company’s sustainability efforts itself.

Desai stated that 21st century marketing gives meaning to desire, gives wants, and creates needs. An example of this is how a pair of jeans can be a symbol of liberation, the newest phone model can help you raise your status. It’s almost telling the world that to be happy, you need to consume more.

Taide Guajardo, Brand Senior Vice President Europe from P&G, has a different opinion. According to him, brands have made their marketing suitable for a sustainable world. P&G has made significant strides in its supply chain and operations which is reflected in its business marketing activities. P&G together with National Geographic Creative Works once launched a campaign to lower the temperature of washing water to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. With communications and campaigns, marketing has an ‘exceptional power’ in the modern and sustainable business world.

This statement was again challenged by Desai by looking at the business reality, which turns out that we have not been able to answer all the challenges now. The ‘exceptional power’ of modern and sustainable business will emerge when business is closer to people, planet, and prosperity that depend on each other. Ultimately, the majority of marketers agree that today’s marketing is incompatible with a sustainable future.

What do you think? Does today’s marketing have the ‘exceptional power’ to actualize marketing in a sustainable world?

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The idea of delivering the most value for the consumer has evolved over the years. As we know, the best marketing strategy is cetera desunt for adaptive future-leader mindset that uncertainly evolved over decades. Companies began to use various promises in effort to persuade and attract customers. The fiercely increasing conditions of competition added the popularity of the concept of “brand” and “advertisement” by adopting the concept of neo-marketing and elaborate them with psychological terms. Albeit, all emotion influences consumers personal relationships, business choices, and buying decisions. The emotion itself has situational and reactive qualities, as well as satisfaction and expectations formed over lifetimes of experiences and interactions.

When a boy goes to an ice cream parlor or restaurant, he will feel befuddled. Choosing what he is going to get, that’s the thing that he despises. Would chocolate chip or strawberry ice cream please him better? Cheeseburger or fried chicken? He feared that what he selected will not give him as much pleasure as the other option would give. What he doesn’t choose could provide a higher sense of pleasure than the one he chose. One interesting finding utilized by neuromarketing is that people really don’t want to lose out. People are just as worried about what they might lose as to what they might gain.
In the meantime, one of the biggest challenges that marketers deal with is customers’ expectations in the pre-purchase phenomenon where the consumers haven’t fixed their buying decision yet. To tackle the challenge, many companies are competing to build relationships with their customers, with the expectations that they will be able to provide the best customer experience for specific individuals. Therefore, the company must be customer-centric to carry out a successful marketing strategy in order to be noticed by consumers and to forge a brand identity.

According to McKinsey (2019), by making a fundamental change of mindset of focusing on the customers, companies gained significant enhancement on several aspects. Along with operational and IT improvements, companies generate 20 to 30 percent uplift in customer satisfaction, a 10 to 20 percent improvement in employee satisfaction, and economic gains ranging from 20 to 50 percent of the cost base addressed in the various journeys.

To overcome these challenges, companies have to understand consumers’ behavior and expectations. Hence, companies should put a bigger concern towards consumers’ buying-cycle from awareness to its advocacy. By implementing the concept of Neuromarketing, stereotypes of the communication matters of the marketing basis will be integrated with taste of individual market itself. The more personalized the promotion, the higher the probability that the advertisement will work. It could be done by using big data to allow the company for this huge aggregation of all consumers personal information that they’ve ever revealed to build a precise representation of who they are, now, more than ever before. Data and insight are not delivered to consumers as a whole but individually by delivering the most value to the customers with a very specific scope based on how they think.

In order to win in today’s marketplace, companies must be customer-centered, to the point that ideally, each individual customer’s values are taken into an account to derive the value that they are truly seeking. In essence, by generating consumer reactions, and treating them not as reactionary receptacles of marketing strategies, but as each their own person with differing individual values. Therefore, reinforcing belief is a very important matter for marketers that influences consumers experience. They must deliver superior value to their target customers traditionally and digitally with knowledge of neuroscience marketing strategies combined. Neuromarketing will surely strengthen customer’s contentment of a product itself.