An Open Letter to the Marketing Community
An Open Letter to the Marketing Community
Dear Marketing Tribe:
Much is afoot nowadays, most of it tragic and worrisome. We are a tribe that seeks “virality” in our productions and realize now what indeed that word means, with its frightening payload. We are a tribe, also, that will face the music when the scythe of corporate layoffs cuts through our community like a hot knife through butter. Marketers are easy to let go. So I know you are stressed about work all the while trying to take care of your families and sharing the existential angst spurred by the pain of others.
Our organizations make decisions for the short-term in what is going to be a long-term boiling of the cauldron. Indeed, the time tables are not harmonized. So put on your seat belts as the ride gets wilder. No sensible macro-economic model suggests anything but a rough, rough time ahead, almost definitely a Depression.
The cauldron produces suffering and stress but it also births ideas and new ways of thinking, organizing, and participating.
So let’s ideate. Let’s find new ways of working together. Let’s not each retreat into our private worlds, cut each other off, only to lay the groundwork for our collective despair. Just as we’re being forced to remember that humans are better together than they are in atomic units, let’s gather in communion not in division. Collective marketing thinking is required. Also, before each of us makes the dreaded mistake of cutting the others’ services, let’s talk about new economic models (that are really old economic models!) like barter. Let’s compassionately support each other.
In my own role as a Marketer- as distinct from my self-characterization as a marketing thinker- I have a choice. Stop spending on media, PR, and physical goods in anticipation of others not buying my products and services. Or I can triangulate and ask my customers to continue commerce but to help them in another way and through this model of nourishment, continue to work with media, vendors, and others.
Let’s also collectively stop generating noise regarding the Covid-19 pandemic. Let’s stop individually marketing our companies’ product and services as “solutions” to the new modes of work and commerce under Covid-19. In doing so, we undercut others who are scrambling to survive.
Forgive me please for the presumption of these suggestions/demands. We are embattled. Times are difficult. But individualized, hasty decisions will be made to the ultimate detriment of all.
In Desperate Solidarity,
Romi
