If we're not registering growth, let's change it.
The race to be the biggest, for productivity or the dominant position, the infinite segmentation of the market offer, the artificial and increasingly costly support of demand, the mortal combat with competitors, the excessive "financialising" of strategies and decisions, the tyranny of the short-term: we are still reasoning within the framework of a growth model that is demonstrating its limits and malfunctions everyday. But whose hands are free enough to break out of this logic ? Is it possible to think any other way in an open world that has universally adopted these urgent rules of the game? One would believe so; not for ideological or opportunistic reasons, but because rethinking corporate development strategies on our respective markets is both an urgent priority and a stimulating perspective. The idea of progress has not died, in fact, it's alive and kicking; there are many directions to explore and each of them is a new source of business and wealth creation.
No future ?
Whether we are entrepreneurs or managers, working or looking for work, let us stop inertly and nervously awaiting for return of economic growth from lower oil prices, from the job market recovery, a stronger dollar, budget restrictions, support to investments or reduced employer labour charges. It is too easy to pass on the responsibility and control of our own destiny onto others [Political officials have fewer and fewer means to do so and should in fact stop so brazenly claiming paternity over it].
No, the creation of our future wealth can be found everyday, where we work, in the company, corporation or administration to which we belong. If our backs are against the proverbial wall of economic crisis, recession depression and failure, we should draw on what our wealthy industrialised Western societies have in abundance: the brains of mostly educated, healthy populations federated by thousands of years of history and common values.
Without challenging the sustainability of the market economy, let us take a moment to try to take advantage of it rather than bowing down to the stereotypical diktats incessantly droned on a definitive tone by consultants, analysts, business or service managers who are powerless compared to what they are paid.
Regardless of the business entity to which we belong (company, administration, institution, association, family, household), let's enjoy ourselves dreaming up other ways of designing, producing, selling, consuming, using, and recycling the products and services that our world needs. Yes, let's have fun, because it is also high time that we stop experiencing our work time as an unavoidable sacrifice with the weekend, holidays or retirement as the only light at the end of the tunnel. What kind of a smiling future can a generation of worried, selfish and disillusioned men and women prepare for its children?
A new five-way street.
To enable the dominant model to progress durably, five key fundamental directions may be explored. They do not cover the many imaginable initiatives, but they offer the advantage – and contrary to the unbearable lightness of the all-Internet craze – of basing growth on something solid, useful, universal, sharable and durable.
Direction one: think in a peaceful world. No war is eternal; even the One Hundred Years War ended one day. War strategy wounds, kills, destroys, breeds false victors and frustrates the truly vanquished. It can momentarily mobilise energies, activate the survival instinct, stimulate ingenuity, but it wears thin and is ultimately powerless over time. While we too often settle for acting and, worse, reasoning on a logic of conflict. Our strategies, our marketing plans, our mental attitudes, our relationships with our superiors, our peers or our subordinates reek of fear, submission, justification, hiding behind façades or playing power games.
Albeit, one must be able to deal with the unexpected, climb back up a slippery slope or hold steady against aggressive competition. This is the least that can be expected of a business or administrative manager. But thinking in a peaceful world means giving ourselves more chances to come up with a really useful and durable offer. This is really "creating" value rather than settling for capturing someone else's. If sugar beet cropping and processing in France owes much to the sea blockade the English had imposed on Napoleon, it is essentially during peacetime that our societies have designed and constructed their finest works.
Which product, which service, which attitude would you like to offer your customers and employees in an environment where others (your customers, retail network, shareholders) did not systematically dictate the road to follow? With which other company, which other brand would you like to pool your resources and talents to devise another way of fulfilling your mission to your customers? What is that great project you have believed in so long and which you will finally have the courage to implement? In a feeble and upset environment, it is the men and women who are able to think beyond the crisis who will come out best.
Direction two: dare to confront reality. Let us stop buying market shares, shares of voice or shelf to hide our real inability to design and sell products and services that meet the real needs and expectations of our customers. At what industrial, commercial, marketing, advertising and even ethical cost are we buying their interest and loyalty? Which pathetic belly-dance will we have to do to persuade them that our offer still meets their needs and desires? Why are we complaining about our customers' increasing opportunism and disloyalty that the short-sightedness and ego-centrism of our marketing only encourages?
Manipulating signs and opinions has its own limits. On some markets, we can see the first signs of a certain "de-consumption" within populations that are either saturated, or simply aware that the extra happiness or pleasure they are being offered is socially costly and economically illusory. The phenomenon is recent and, for the time being, restricted to socially affluent classes; but let us not forget that, at one time, this was also the case of cultural activities, stock market investment, taking distant holidays or buying property.
The decline in consumer desire (rather than in consumption) is perhaps not yet clearly noticeable in the figures, but it is written in filigree behind the treadmill of our current growth model. Why own a bigger car when we cannot drive it in all the traffic? Why regularly change a mobile phone or computer when we only use 10% of its features? Why buy instant-pleasure products when their fleeting consumption perpetually leaves a bitter aftertaste? Why invest in the long-term in a world of short-term cycles? Why pay for something that has already been offered free of charge? Which is the most appealing brand: the one that offers its customers a chance to create a festive event with others, or one that considers its customers' growing and mostly undesired tendency to live alone by coming out with a version of its offer in individual portions? Observations of disillusionment and frustration among our contemporaries are dangerously increasing.
Today, being realistic can no longer mean being cynical, but quite the opposite, it means taking into consideration the fundamental aspirations that structure the human being. It is when a brand or offer voluntarily goes out to meet them that it has the most chance of creating sustainable value. So let us take the time to rethink our way of designing, producing and selling against this standard. A thousand unexploited ideas will immediately come to mind.
Direction three: think of the customer / employee / shareholder/ citizen and think of oneself as a single person. Dominated by excessive dialectical thought, we take apart, we segment, we oppose virtual communities, disincarnated beings on clever mappings. Our indicators, our typologies, our strategic reasoning, our action plans are devised around these shimmering profiles which we believe never belong to the same person. Worse, we build a wall between our business life and private life by saving ourselves the need to be the wonderful and upright person we are at home or from having to be the brave and devoted manager we are at work.
Yet, the facts prove it: our interests, our behaviour, our opinions and values are strangely similar regardless of their place or time of expression. Impatience, opportunism, disillusionment and individualism generate acts that do not apply to commerce alone. In the same way, expectations for transparency, respect or sense of responsibility are shared by the customer, the employee, the shareholder and the citizen whom we are in turn and at the same time. Thinking of and behaving towards others as a single person means considerably reducing the illusion, frustration and error rates that are resulting from the expanding schizophrenia of our thoughts and our acts. Whether we are selling machinery or cotton swabs, why not rethink all of our marketing plans by including this forgotten dimension?
Direction four: prefer the truth. Is it because our investment and consumption models are out of steam that we are artificially prolonging their lives? Financial engineering schemes disconnected from any economic reality, pseudo product innovation with stardust in your eyes, vain technological incrimination, masked deterioration of the quality and origin of ingredients, illusionist packaging designs, abusive contests, annulment, commitment or irresponsibility clauses in every basic contract, falsely advantageous flat rates or service contracts, etc.: all of these stratagems invented to achieve objectives are very tempting while they superbly ignore the deep gashes they cut into the trust and desire equity among those concerned.
"The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife” said the amazing David Ogilvy. What is true for the world of mass consumption is just as true in business-to-business. If we lie, manipulate, choose the easy way out, let our intelligence serve a bad cause, often in good faith or for good reasons, we will miss an opportunity to devise offers that are desirable in themselves, without artifices or excessive conquest and loyalty creation costs. And if we dare to rethink what already exists against this standard? What are the fundamentals that explain the existence of our market, our company, our products? What real added value are we contributing to all of the populations concerned? How, in our private conscience do we intend to make our own contribution? These are a few questions to usefully enrich the agenda of our next management seminars.
Direction five: develop offers that show respect. Respect for the people who produce them, sell them, encounter and use them, respect for the environments in which they express themselves and are a part. Do we sincerely believe that, according to the famous Maslow pyramid, only answers to lower physiological needs produce value? Why so noisily and increasingly flatter our most common instincts? Why consider marketing relationships with youths solely from the angle of narcissism, possession and clan conformism? Are we now condemned by some strange conspiracy among retail chains, billboard networks, local officials and regional administrations to enter our cities by running the gauntlet of unsightly trade zones? Must we indefinitely accept such and such a pollutant or harmful process for reasons of economic survival? Where then is the consideration supposedly "due the customer"? What is behind the words "quality", "innovation", "the only real wealth are people" that generously sprinkle our annual reports?
The limit of the "culture of condescension" that is more and more perniciously extending its tentacles into our everyday lives, is that it bears within it the seed of the deep frustrations and wounds that inevitably result in distancing, boycott, or even violence.
The value of tomorrow is not hidden in our refusal of alienating growth models, but in our desire to constantly and truthfully challenge the satisfaction of the needs and expectations of each one of us. No business sector should deprive itself of the opportunity – and, between us, the privilege – of being able to reinvent the growth model in which it is living.
The five directions identified above are only a tiny fraction of the tremendous fields of opportunities that remain to be explored. Not alone, in the secret chambers of a consulting firm, in front of a computer or at the lab table in the laboratory, but with all of the people who combine their talent and their time within their company or administration. Growth today must be rethought collectively. Not to "be socially correct", but because each of us in fact directly influences the relevance and success of the model to be developed. Growth means growing in all senses of the term. It is up to us to invent growth that will make us all grow.
© Aubry Pierens* / We
 Would you like to give your marketing strategy another inspiration?
© Aubry Pierens, founding partner of We consultancy, is the co-author of "Les Clés pour Innover" (Editions Liaisons) and a professor at the M.I.P [Management Institute of Paris] |
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