Lazy Marketers – How can anyone build a sustainable brand if consumer stress is the result of your brand promise?

Tyler Durden said it best: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.”

The New Economics Foundation is a think tank based in the UK who recently published a spectacular document that calculates the “real value to society of different professions” (http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/bit-rich).

Their calculations estimate the share of social and environmental damage caused by overconsumption that is attributable to advertising, and advertising executives rank spectacularly low in their research in terms of their net benefit to society. The math suggests that a daycare worker generates at least £7 of societal benefit for every £1 they are paid, while an advertising executive destroys £11 of value for every pound they are paid. It goes without saying that ad execs earn much more than daycare workers.

The suggestion is that advertising “encourages high consumer spending and indebtedness. It can create insatiable aspirations, fuelling feelings of dissatisfaction, inadequacy and stress.” This study quantifies what we all suspect – advertising may be a necessary evil if we want to be entertained with “free” radio and television, but at its foundation the job of advertising is to keep us “chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” By igniting consumer stress, advertisers are in fact generating negative value.

I run a marketing agency, so I guess that makes me an “ad exec” of sorts. I do keep my clients branding efforts as “human” as the brand will allow (that’s the “Sociable” element of the company name), but the fact is that I am working to sell more “units” of whatever my client is “selling”. This New Economics Foundation paper has me thinking about my prospective client base, but also about marketing strategy. Is all marketing and advertising evil?

In difficult economic times, people need to cut back and purchase only essential items. Cars and clothes are necessary, but perhaps the designer labels can be cut back? Perhaps it makes sense to buy a used car instead of new? Nobody will put these thoughts on a billboard, but we all know it makes sense – and when was the last time you felt remorseful for a smart decision?

If someone buys something they don’t really need they will likely feel an eventual degree of buyer’s remorse. I therefore have to wonder - how the hell anyone can build a sustainable brand or product line in the long-term if consumer remorse, pain and stress are built into the brand promise?

I don’t question The New Economics Foundations’ results, but I do believe these results are driven by lazy marketing and lazy marketers. Before a business fabricates an illusion to support sales, how about developing an understanding of how the product can provide real, quantifiable value in the lives of your consumers? Instead of scaring your customers into a purchase decision, how about revealing a genuine significance? You may not sell as many units this quarter, but your business may still be here in twenty years. It is a big world, and consumer needs are as diverse as its population. Unless your business goal is to dump a load of consumer crap on the world and pack your business in next year, you need to get past the greed of generating immediate cash flow, and generate real value to a targeted consumer.

Otherwise, in the words of Tyler Durden, your customers will be thinking…. “we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.” A twenty-year-plus return will almost definitely be greater than a one-year fast burn – and you may even generate some incremental societal value along the way.