Economic growth is marketing’s real contribution to society

For marketers who like a narrative – buoyed by the belief that storytelling is what modern populations are crying out for, even from purveyors of fish fingers and business machines – here is a morality tale for our times.

It starts back in 1976, when Robert Monks, a wealthy US lawyer and business owner, is out on the campaign trail in Maine, in a bid to win a seat in the Senate.

What he sees stops him in his tracks – a damascene moment for this son of a Boston preacher who for 43 years has lived a life high on the capitalist hog. There below him is a river overflowing with effluent spewed out by corporate factories upstream.

Monks finds it impossible to believe that any director of the company responsible would actively want this pollution, but that it happens anyway, because, as he will frame it later, “the corporation is an externalising machine in the same way that a shark is a killing machine”.

He vows to dedicate his life to forcing corporations to take responsibility for the effects of their activities on society and the environment – but knows enough about the workings of the capitalist system to recognise that this must also mean changes in how those corporations are set up and run at the highest level.

His bid for the Senate fails. As do two further attempts, one by a landslide. But government’s loss is society’s gain, as the activist shareholder vehicle he launches in 1985 will utterly transform the way business is conducted. One by one, over the coming decades, the giants of US and then global commerce will take their environmental, societal and governance decisions as seriously as they take their financial ones. Monks has pioneered what we now call ESG.

Robert Monks’ personal story came to an end with his death in April at the age of 91, but his legacy is established and the agenda he shaped is as relevant as ever.

What part, so far, have marketers played in that story? It’s chequered, if we’re honest – and the reason for that is the marketer’s predilection for narrative.

At first, corporations would make changes based on audits and simply disclose – and much of this would have been the stuff of company annual reports and investor meetings. The ‘governance’ element of the trilogy, in particular, was of interest only to a narrow audience. One change for which Monks lobbied tirelessly, for example, was the separation of chair and chief executive roles, to sunder the emperor-like concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. It was important, but not the stuff of mainstream news.

But marketers, with their focus on consumers, itched to take ESG further, to tell a story, to weave a narrative that could emotionally connect the company’s ESG actions with its brands.

At one level, there is sense in linking isolated actions into a coherent narrative, since a storyline is easier to ingest than seemingly disconnected initiatives.

But the danger is that the story itself becomes the driver of decisions, where certain ESG initiatives are prioritised because they suit the narrative, and others are dropped because they don’t: the tale that wags the dog.

In the hands of marketers, ESG became much more about the catchy issues of the day, which is why a disproportionate amount is focused on the ‘E’, because the environment and climate change are where the intensity is.

Where marketers venture to the ‘S’, they become drawn to the innate drama of the culture wars, taking a stand on social themes like toxic masculinity, taking the knee or trans rights – often to find themselves uncomfortably on a different side of the debate from their customers.

Marketing doesn’t do much to highlight or influence anything that comes under the ‘G’, because that is the dry stuff of boardroom oversight and fiduciary checks and balances, with its low promise for storytelling.

The question is whether marketers should be in a position to sway important ESG objectives at all. This is the kind of business-critical, sometimes sacrificial, decision that belongs at the highest levels of the corporation, with only the senior marketer who is there at the boardroom table to be one leadership voice among many.

But if everyday marketers are eased from the ESG agenda – a move many will resent – how will they fulfil their yearning to be making a difference in society?

There is a simple answer to that, and it’s one that takes us to a sometimes undercelebrated role of free-market commercial endeavour. In the end, it is business – through its taxable profits, through its employment of millions of taxpaying employees – that is the ultimate source of the funds for all the public projects and services of society.

Society needs business to thrive. More than that: if it is to dodge the Malthusian tug to impoverishment, it needs economic growth.

In the mid 1980s, when Monks set his sights on the rapacious side of capitalism, US GDP growth was running at a healthy 4.2%. Today it hovers around half of that in the US and struggles to climb above 1% in the UK, Eurozone and Japan – dangerously low levels that have seen politicians around the world crying out to make growth a priority.

So, the societal role that marketers can play in today’s world is aligned with their commercial role: to do the hard work of innovating to grow the corporation’s brands, to invent whole new categories of products and services, and to seek efficiencies to achieve more with less.

That endeavour would be undertaken within the principles of good corporate citizenship, but where ESG is the context, not the story. Either way, for society’s sake, as well as the corporation’s, ‘growth’ must become another ‘G’.

It is a reversion to marketing basics that will not appeal to everyone – especially those who signed up for what they perceive as a more values-driven, touchy-feely, zeitgeisty kind of career. But that’s the way it’s turned out. And it wouldn’t be much of a narrative, would it, if it didn’t have a twist in the tail.