Helping the Customer, Instead of Lowering Their Attention Threshold

In our society, ignorance seems to have become a value and a daily practice, with the consequent decline of the cultural and ethical standards of the world we live in. This phenomenon is helped by the spread of marketing principles and tools originally conceived to improve relationships between companies and their customers, which, however, applied in a distorted and improper way, have contributed to impoverishing the value of knowledge in individuals, compromising their critical spirit and their ability to reason, to choose and behave responsibly.

To give an example, Amazon has built its success on the ability to offer its customers speed, simplicity, customization, proactive consumer advice and buying suggestions. However, this model has led to an “age of impatience” in which large segments of the population expect everything right away. Speed ​​has become haste, and haste translates, for example, into excessive brevity in the media system, which hinders the public’s ability and willingness to analyze and delve deeper, and even to engage in dialogue. The simplicity of use favors the spread of intolerance towards fatigue and effort, and the habit of receiving feeds based on algorithms favors the daily training in delegation, passivity and conformism.

The contribution of the application of marketing concepts and methods to the promotion of ignorance in our society calls for a more general reflection on how the world of corporate marketing risks losing its identity and soul, being distorted for various interdependent reasons.

The first is an overly reductive interpretation of marketing as pure and simple communication, rather than as a discipline aimed at understanding and creating value for customers. This can lead to an excess of attention to form (which is important) over substance (which is fundamental) and to the dominance of emotional narration over the essential representation of facts.

The second is an excessive fragmentation of marketing decisions and activities, often subcontracted to a plethora of hyper-specialized agencies and external subjects, which lack a real underlying connection with the company’s mission and escape oversight to be really accountable for the achievement or underachievement of objectives. The parcellation of decisions and operations tends to make us lose sight of truly strategic issues, such as segmentation, positioning, market innovation.

A third problematic factor is the focus on the short term: the development of technological tools (digital channels, automation, algorithms) allows us to achieve advantages in analytical rapidity and decision-making speed through the real-time understanding of many phenomena (in particular the cause-effect relationship between marketing decisions and actions and customer responses), but also risks leading to hasty evaluations, dictated by impatience. Strategic choices cannot and should not be evaluated immediately, they cannot be measured by counting the likes on social media posts. This is complemented by the predominance of the dictatorship of quarterly results, which discourages truly strategic thinking, long-term perspective and risk-taking, instead encouraging the use of shortcuts and the delegation to third parties (in particular influencers, testimonials and external content creators), the creation of competitive advantage and differentiation.

Fourth: the widespread availability of information, often excessive in its amount to the point of hindering decision-making, tends to standardize approaches between different companies. This generates vicious circles of imitative repetitiveness that end up reducing innovation across all marketing levers, also as a consequence of the widespread adoption of algorithms.

Finally, a further and decisive element of risk for marketing is the dehumanization induced by the use of technological and automated tools in the taking of many decisions. This phenomenon is aggravated by the recent spread of artificial intelligence.

All these factors contribute to generating the risk of distorting and impoverishing the very meaning of marketing in companies, which should instead be to orchestrate the entire organization around the centrality of customers. The challenge, or rather the opportunity, consists in recovering and promoting a role of greater responsibility for marketing, within companies and across society. To cite two emblematic examples: with respect to issues that are central to companies today, namely digitalization and sustainability, marketing and sales functions often have a secondary, when not marginal, role compared to IT and supply chain management. In this way, we risk missing the train of how to transform these two phenomena into decisive elements for individual and collective progress. It is time for marketing managers to question themselves on the deeper meaning of their profession, to recover those prerogatives that make it, potentially, among the most interesting and enriching in the managerial profession, and reflect more critically on their own responsibility for the impact of their decisions and actions on communities and society at large.