Can marketing overcome its trust issues?

Marketing has a bit of an image problem. Many consumers believe the profession is immoral and greedy, selling things that people don’t really need – a view so widespread that a new book, Tell the Truth, tells marketers they need to be more authentic in their claims. Even within businesses the function is often misunderstood, with many departments only consulting marketers when they want to create an advert.

But marketers are fighting back and attempting to rebrand the sector to make it appear more trustworthy. Marc Mathieu, senior vice-president of marketing at Unilever, believes that instead of being perceived as a promotions department, marketing can be considered a noble profession (see Viewpoint, below).

Mathieu, however, has a job on his hands if he is to convince others of his view. One recent article in The Guardian suggested that Footlocker’s popularity among looters in last year’s riots would please its marketing director. It read: “In one sense, mobs of looters at your stores sends the same message as mobs of shoppers. People are desperate for your goods.”

And when the Chartered Institute of Marketing approached environmental commentator Jonathon Porritt for comment on how marketers could tackle social, economic and environmental change for its report The Triple Bottom Line, the result was less than positive.

Porritt stated: “The cumulative impact of billions of corporate dollars, spent marketing their products, year after year after year, stimulating, reinforcing and exacerbating people’s consumerist fantasies, is almost wholly pernicious. Today’s marketing spend constitutes a major impediment to achieving a more sustainable society.”

Now people want brands to stand for more than just a product, they want a human idea that they can believe in

CIM director of research and professional development David Thorp responds: “While that’s a fairly extreme view that overlooks a lot of the good marketing can do in terms of the techniques being used for behaviour change on social issues, a lot of people would agree there was a lot of resonance with their own views. We’re in a situation where marketing is seen as being very short term in focus, when there are wider issues in our society that need to be aligned with.”

Sherilyn Shackell, founder of The Marketing Academy which mentors young marketers, acknowledges that inappropriate marketing in the past has trained the public to notice only poor campaigns, and feels that marketers need to tap into people’s hunger for social change.

She explains: “Consumers are now a lot more aware of how their actions impact on the greater world, and maybe marketing has been a little slow to respond to the new public mindset that says we should be looking at the good we can do, rather than something for entirely commercial benefit.”

Product development

If marketing gets involved in the product development stage of brands, then they can become more involved in driving social change from the product up, believes Unilever’s Mathieu. The FMCG giant’s Crafting Brands For Life strategy aims to holistically marry marketing and product development to re-enforce the idea within the company that Unilever creates truly useful brands that improve people’s lives, and thus make marketing a “noble” function once more.

And it is not just functional brands such as soaps and washing powders that can drive social change, argues Mathieu. He says: “Lifestyle brands have an important part to play in the sustainability agenda because one of the reasons consumers don’t act sustainably is because they see it as a compromise between their lifestyle and the life of the planet.”

Mathieu cites campaigns such as Puma’s Clever Little Bag, which saw a switch to Yves Béhar-designed packaging, as prime examples of how lifestyle brands can implement a successful sustainability agenda. The new packaging not only uses 65% less paper than conventional shoe boxes, saving 10,000 tons of carbon emissions a year, but also includes a reusable tote bag, so customers think they are getting more out of their purchase.

Many marketers will have to challenge the way in which their business approaches product development if their department is to get involved at an early stage of the process, argues Market Research Society (MRS) chief executive Jane Frost.

Frost, who has led internal rebrands at the BBC and HMRC, says: “Far fewer marketers are at the first stage of the design process compared with the number at the selling end of the commercial process.”

Brand strategist Jonathan Salem Baskin, who co-wrote the aforementioned book Tell The Truth, which is soon to be published, adds that marketers need to be instrumental in coming up with products that really are different, instead of just coming up with innovative ways to sell similar types of product. “We live with the premise that you can come up with eight versions of identical toothpaste and smoke and mirrors make them look different. That time is over.”

Ashley Stockwell, who was Virgin Media executive director of brand and marketing and is now global sales and marketing director at Global Ethics, agrees that “the product should sell itself and if it doesn’t sell itself, then you probably need to look at the product”. And this is where marketers could really make a difference to business and their reputation, he believes.

This line of thought led industry body D&AD to launch its White Pencil award last year. The programme challenges the best creative minds to develop an idea or campaign that would change the world for the better, but also show the public that marketing can be a force for good.

D&AD chief executive Tim Lindsay says: “It was expressly invented to demonstrate the power of creativity to change things for the better. There’s a hunger client-side to talk about issues of sustainability, having a purpose beyond profit and being better corporate citizens. Marketing can be a vehicle for that.”

It’s important too that a social agenda chimes strongly with the product’s essential attributes and the key objective of a business – making a profit. Unilever examples include Dove’s Real Women campaign, which featured a range of different body shapes and sizes rather than petite models, and helped promote the “high order agenda” of self-esteem while still encouraging women to buy. Persil’s Dirt is Good campaign similarly encouraged children to abandon their Xbox for more physically engaging play outdoors, but also increased sales as outdoor play meant muddier clothes.

Match promise with delivery

However, many consumers remain unconvinced that companies can do good while making a profit. For Salem Baskin, the key to avoiding this cynicism is to match advertising promises with the services you provide.

He says: “The challenge for marketing to reinvent itself and find new credibility with consumers is to become keepers and communicators of the truth, so that consumers believe brands when they speak to us.”

Perhaps it’s telling that campaigns from Nivea, Nokia, Visa, HP and Canon – which all feature highly in the Reader’s Digest’s 2012 Most Trusted Brands European survey – focus on key product attributes rather than lifestyle branding.

For many companies, creating external trust involves rebranding marketing internally, explaining the importance of brand identity and empowering all employees to live it. This month, investment and legal services provider Legal & General launched its Every Day Matters campaign externally – a strategy that it had been implementing with agency Smith & Milton internally since 2007 (see Q&A, below).

Right language

At Unilever, changing the perception of marketing has meant changing how employees talk about customers. Mathieu says: “It’s interesting to think about how marketing has tried to brand itself. We don’t talk about people, we talk about consumers, or even worse we talk about targets. If you’re a target you probably don’t feel a lot for the people who are targeting you. I’m trying to make our vocabulary more human in essence.”

Language was also important for Frost at MRS when carrying out internal rebrands at HMRC and the BBC, often steering away from the word ‘marketing’ in favour of terms that matched the objectives of other departments.

Frost says: “At the BBC you didn’t talk about marketing, but you could talk about brands. You talked in creative language because that was the language of the business.”

When Stockwell was at Virgin Media, rebranding internally meant more than just speaking differently, but stepping outside the marketing department and heading up the HR team for seven months. He says: “It was a way to get the business to understand the importance of brand.”

But Stockwell suggests that marketers are themselves partly to blame for their bad reputation within their own organisations. He says: “Marketers are the worst people at marketing themselves. As marketing professionals, part of our job is to promote our profession.”

Frost suggests that just as Stockwell ventured into HR, improving the standing of marketing might involve getting out of the marketing department. She says: “The trend that happened in the late 1990s of putting marketers on the board has been reversed and that’s a problem.

“There has also been a growth in the customer area [especially with the advent of social media] that needs to be populated by different talents, including operational talents [meaning that the remit of marketing is wider]. Perhaps marketers have to occupy that space rather than hanging on to the name marketer.”

The Marketing Academy’s Shackell agrees that the role of the marketer has shifted dramatically with the digital age and more effort needs to be made to make sure the new world of marketing is well articulated.

She believes: “Marketing at its best is about delivering true value, an exceptional experience for the customer and appropriate pricing. It’s the appropriate focus on what that individual needs to really make a difference rather than what we want to sell them. And if we approach marketing in that way, then how is it not a noble profession?”