Marketing Industry Overhaul Needed

By: Rubina Cohen, CEO + Principal of Firefly Strategies Global

As I sit here contemplating the changes and direction we need to go as a company, and as I've completed a few  marketing strategies and plans for clients, I see they have taken a new focus. Our plans and strategies are looking at human-centered outcomes rather than focused solely on profit driven ones. With that I am compelled to write and share today what I have been feeling for some time now, and that is that the marketing industry desperately needs an overhaul. 

Marketing is long overdue for a drastic overhaul, with brand new systems, principles and laws to help determine success, sustainability and well-being of companies and their customers. It's not just a gut feeling anymore, it feels absolutely and definitely time to re-examine the modus operandi of marketing and it about time we turn to and look at other models particularly those offered in nature, indigenous wisdom traditions, as well as biological and physics models, to re-design and create innovations in marketing.

I anticipate that as we look into this further, we'll start to delve into business and economic models as well...marketing is a an arm of business operations and businesses are in large part what make up our economy.

I am witness to a tremendous amount of stress, seeing the mental health crises both personally, professionally on a local and global scale, am surrounded by sickness and illness that can be linked back, sadly, to marketing, marketing strategies, marketing tools that are currently prevalent in our society. Without a serious commitment to a thorough critical examination that then leads to a re-design of marketing, I don't see how these symptoms are going to change. I know other industries and systems play a role in our well-being and that of the planet, but as a marketer I feel called to look at the areas that I participate in and thus can have greatest impact on.

• How can marketing be conducted based on outcomes that go beyond the purchase?
  
• What marketing tools are creating environments, scenarios and conditions that are toxic to customers?
  
• What content does not serve the well-being of the purchaser?
  
• What role does marketing play in elevating the quality of life of the consumer?
  
• What delusions does marketing create around the phrase QUALITY OF LIFE and how can marketing truthfully and honestly provide quality of life enhancement for the consumer?
  
• Can marketing be designed to look beyond profit and have profit be a by product of something greater that benefits tremendously both the company and the customer?
  
• Can marketing create positive impact that spans generations?
  
• Can marketing create situations where vitality can occur for the consumer and for the planet?
  
• Further, can marketing help consumers thrive, become resilient, rather than create conditions that enable divisiveness, fear, narcissism and loneliness?

As my company Firefly Strategies Global and I enter 2022 these are the questions we are challenging ourselves to ask and the work we are stepping into, boldly and humbly. I can only imagine the harsh lessons we are about to more clearly see and learn about and yet, I am excited about the conversations, clients, connections, collaborations, we will create based on this path we are setting forth! Happy New Year! 

​#marketing #achangeiscoming #industryoverhaul

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