For Goodness Sake
The first group discussion on the idea to create More Movement with Marketing happened this week on Tuesday. I was speaking to a room of Rochester, NY’s experienced advertising and marketing minds representing agencies with both national and regional client rosters, academia professionals, and folks from the non-profit sector. I knew this session would be a really important early step in the discovery process. And it was.
After sharing the background for where this idea came from, I quickly presented the basic model of how we might use the forces, motivations and needs of brands, agencies and talent to riff on the traditional marketing model—shifting the outcome from driving consumer behavior at scale to driving social impact at scale. (Check it out on www.marketingmovement.org for deeper detail.)
The group was highly engaged and raised a lot of good questions, a lot of concerns and a lot of encouragement. I went home and documented all of it as a starting point for the discovery input.
Then as I was driving around the next morning, I started processing and turning over those questions and concerns in my mind. They pushed me to think about the spectrum that exists between an individualist and collectivist mindset. Doing good is a relative concept.
“What’s in it for me” is a critical part of any social impact model for businesses to embrace fully. As John Mackey states in Conscious Capitalism, “Make decisions in such a way that they have positive impacts in multiple directions for all stakeholders.”
The marketing for movement model does this, but the great questions that came from the group made me realize that the ultimate goal of the model, to have all efforts messaging against a single idea in various creative ways at one time–creating a level of unprecedented noise in the market supporting one issue–is not enough to make participation an easy yes. The “what’s in it for me” for brands, agencies and talent might not be strong enough to garner participation, even with the outcome being a far more effective way to move the needle on any one issue.
This led me to thinking about effective altruism–donating to the world’s most effective charities, regardless of a personal connection or feeling for the cause. Effective altruism stands in opposition to the way most people give. It’s not the norm to think about giving in terms of effectiveness and examine how every dollar can have the biggest impact. Usually, giving is more about supporting causes that relate to donors’ personal interests, circle of friends and family.
Transferring these concepts to this effort, maybe the marketing movement model is fighting for support of “effective social impact marketing” in the same vein as effective altruism. It requires tipping the scales in favor of doing the most amount of good, even if it requires giving up some weight of self-interest–although not all. And maybe it will require finding participants who are willing to do good, for goodness sake, above all else. Or maybe it won’t.
Maybe this discovery process can uncover a way where scales don’t need to be tipped and gain is equal on all ends. I hope that’s the case, for goodness sake.
