Last year, Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya and Iwan Setiawan published their book “Marketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit”. It is essentially about how customers should not be looked upon as consumers but as “as complex, emotional, value-driven and multi-dimensional human beings”.
Marketing 3.0, also known as human-centric marketing (or as I always say “people-centric”), is a hot topic. It’s not about customer-centricity anymore. It’s about people-centricity, even if most businesses are not even able to be truly customer-centric yet, but that’s another debate.
Co-founder of Smart Insights (where I found the picture below), Danyl, wrote a hands-on post, called “7 ideas for marketing with the customer in mind” (and as I tweeted, you can never have enough of those), rightfully stating we’re told to be human-centric, inspired by “éminence grise” Philip Kotler.
Human values in the centre of the marketing process
Many experts say that we need to have a new look at marketing since people are connected and participating, rather than passive “audiences”. You’ve heard it before. And now, they also advice us to put human values and the multi-dimensional human being in the centre of marketing, in a holistic way.
One doesn’t criticize Philip Kotler nor all the other marketing gurus out there. However, the concept of Marketing 3.0, proves that marketing gurus sometimes tend to forget the past, even their own.
Philip Kotler Marketing 3.0 presentation, captured by Guy Kawasaki - via Smart Insights
Marketing 3.0 is NOT a consequence of the age of participation
If marketing gurus only start to see what they call “Marketing 3.0” now, quite a few of them must be at least a bit responsible for the fact that “marketers are stuck in the past”.
Marketing 3.0 looks like an approach many marketers (I’m certainly not the only one) have preached and practiced for ages, at least if you have been focusing on what people really want instead of what only you wanted. The psychological dimension of human needs, desires and preferences has always been important, both for GOOD sales people that understood what makes people buy from a holistic perspective (thus including their values and emotional and social needs) and for people-centric marketers.
I know, many haven’t been caring too much about that and psychology in marketing was (and still often is) about principles of persuasion and the sometimes disgusting practices that tap into our human ‘weaknesses’, making us addicted or tapping into strong human emotions such as fear.
While Maslow, who had a very – in fact, much too – positive view on human beings and what drives them, is often openly misused by marketers, many of the strong and hidden persuaders are about jealousy, anxiety, lust and other human emotions we like to ignore (for the record: I’m a Jungian). We also deny the emotional dimensions of what we call logic, which is ‘de facto’ often a fiction and an ‘a posteriori’ interpretation of what deep down is driven by emotion. Psychology in marketing does not mean quoting Maslow all the time because it suits you, without even understanding from where his pyramid comes and why it is not even scientific or meant for marketing purposes to begin with.
Why is this whole “new” concept of human-centric marketing and Marketing 3.0 so amazingly familiar and why am I so surprised to see how it is the new mantra of marketing expertise and a new generation of marketers that live in the assumption everything on this planet is ‘social’?
I am a big fan of ‘social’, people-centricity, human-centricity, Marketing 3.0, or whatever you want to call it. However, it is not – read my lips – a consequence of “the age of participation and collaborative marketing via the Internet”, as most claim.
The problem with dehumanizing marketing talk
One explanation I see (but, please enlighten me if you see others) is that it’s, as a marketing “approach” or “philosophy”, merely proof of the fact marketers, chanting the new mantra, have rarely been on the streets, selling, studying what makes people human and looking beyond concepts and theories. Furthermore, having studied philosophical anthropology and witnessed how several professions dehumanize human beings by reducing them to labels, I can’t help but notice that marketers are very good at this as well. It’s seldom about people and often about prospects, suspects, targets, consumers, subscribers, followers, fans and whatnot. This very fact has led many marketers to hide behind their dashboards and communication channels, sending messages to people they didn’t bother to know because they didn’t need to. Today, and I guess that’s why “Marketing 3.0″ is popular all of the sudden, they HAVE to.
It’s not only like this in marketing. Many marketers are in no way different than people who work in legal or medical functions, using words such as “patient”, “legal subject”, “legal entity”, “suspect”, “contractor” and many more (don’t let me get started on politics or taxes) to reduce human complexity to labels.
The dehumanizing language of ‘experts’ in several domains and the need to see people in their “holistic” context, is something you learn when working with other people and focusing on their real needs in real-life, like many good sales people and marketers I have known.
Some small – philosophical – personal words of advice
I don’t agree with experts that sell the “Marketing 3.0″ theories and approaches as new or say they are due to the ‘social media age’. Marketing 3.0 exists since a long time but few practiced it. Get rid of the theories about people, personal, empathy, compassion, emotion, needs and values. Where I come from they call that empathy and common sense.
But most of all, let’s not start pretending we’re in marketing for a higher purpose or to serve humanity. Brandwashing is not an illusion, money still makes the world go round and marketing is about profit. Ethical marketing is an oxymoron, people-centric marketing isn’t. I hope. But it’s more than a model of a ‘social’ world. The world hasn’t become a more social place, maybe that’s the biggest brainwashing we have ever witnessed: the illusion of power to the people in marketing.
Below is a slideshare I found regarding Marketing 3.0. Remember what really matters (people), forget the hype parts.
About J-P De Clerck
