Few businesses are as misunderstood as marketing. For some people marketing is a cynical, unethical assault on the consumer, an endless push to persuade people they need to buy more and more stuff from increasingly faceless corporations. It’s become a dirty word.

The more we talk to people, the clearer it becomes that the general perception of marketing doesn’t fit with how marketing should be. I was taught that marketing was the management of a mutually beneficial exchange between a business and its customers. There are other definitions but, to me, this suggests the most meaningful framework. It doesn’t talk about tricking people into buying things. It focuses on building relationships.

Between myself and Phillippa we have over thirty years’ marketing experience. Trends have come and gone, new platforms have emerged, and people have continually sought to redefine the business. Most importantly, the world has changed, the way we communicate has changed, and there is a whole set of new concerns for business.

So we’ve been discussing marketing. A lot. With people inside and outside the industry. It’s obvious that marketing needs to rethink itself, and communicate these new ideas to people. Except they’re not really new ideas. What we want to communicate is the old ideas, the core of what we think marketing is about.

For over a year we’ve been looking at new ways to do things, new ways to make marketing cohesive, relevant and sustainable. We’ve built communities, tested concepts and tried to get back to the mutually beneficial exchange. We’ve set out to take it further, to see how a marketing company could be a catalyst for shared value, economic growth and sustainable relationships.

We’ve written about some of the new approaches on this site, and there are more to come. But they don’t change the over-riding principle, that everything is connected. And building upon these connections, for everyone’s benefit, is the real work of marketing.

Relevance

We strongly believe in design principles (and they’re at the core of what we do over at Redfront). Design thinking puts the customer first. It helps them solve their problems, it helps to make the products and services they want relevant to them. Marketing should be built around these values, but too often it’s not. Of course you can sell people things they don’t want or need, but how long can you keep doing that? True understanding of the customer needs provides the firmest foundation, it helps you build relationships. And solid relationships are the essence of value.

Creativity

If you want to talk to people, engage them in conversation, you need to capture their imagination. You should tell stories (not lies), make them think and add something to their lives instead of just pillaging their attention. We’re always looking for the most creative approach but we can’t do it on our own. That’s why Phillippa has spent over a year working on pop_up, a fast-growing network of incredible creative talent. We support them to grow, collaborate and share ideas so that we can find the most creative solution to any project.

Learning

The exchange of ideas is vital. Businesses and customers learning from each other is essential for establishing trust and building long-term relationships. Businesses need to know what matters to customers. Customers want useful, practical, meaningful information. Not sales patter, but new ideas. We’re always exploring new areas, discussing things and sharing new learning. From our #unethicalweb project to the Social Series, we bring people together to create new value and work out how to do things better.

Collaboration

Collaboration is key to long-term growth. Working with the right people, sharing ideas, creating new things and innovating helps us to solve problems. We foster collaboration through pop_up and we do it ourselves. Through our relationships with marketing, PR, advertising and media companies we can do the best possible work for clients. Closed companies, afraid of competition, will rarely provide the right outcomes for customers. Collaboration isn’t a fluffy ideal, it’s the only way to evolve and improve.

Talent

Our industry needs new people and those people need work. The great thing is that there’s a lot of work to be done. The trick is to find new approaches that balance the requirements of the workforce with the ever more pressing needs of businesses and everything else I’ve talked about here. Two years ago we set out to tackle this by piloting co.lab, a development programme built on a three-way collaboration between young people, businesses and ourselves. The pilots were hugely successful, providing a vital mix of employment, economic growth, industry experience and fast learning.

Sustainability

Sustainability is an all-encompassing word. Most of the things I’ve talked about above are designed for sustainability. pop_up is our way of helping to stimulate and grow the creative industries, learning ensures that things are built for the future, collaboration enables our work to grow bigger than ourselves, and the importance of creating employment opportunities doesn’t really need to be stated.

Of course, when most people talk about sustainability they’re talking about the environment. The move from print to digital has been long trumpeted as an environmental saviour. Unfortunately this just isn’t true. We actively discuss, explore and the impact of communications technologies on the environment. There’s a lot of learning to be done and we’ll be launching some new work around this soon. In the meantime we’re always looking for good examples of low-impact marketing to add to our resources.

There are lots more improvements we could talk about, like transparency and trust, but it’s better to open it up to discussion. It was my intention to set down our vision for how marketing could get back to its core values and in the process start to change the perceptions of the industry, from inside and out. I hope this article has achieved some of those things.