Media & Marketing Clive Simpkins
THERE is a fascinating emerging synergy between current personal development thinking, the ensuing relationships and today’s business marketing. The end of the 1994 business year prompted an examination of marketing and the role of marketers in the light of these subtle yet significant trends and shifts in thinking.
In the good old days, marketing was very much based on the still relevant thinking of Professor Theodore Levitt and his renowned thesis on Marketing Myopia. The general idea being that if you thought you were in the buggy whip business instead of the transport business, you were headed for obsolescence and extinction.
Business schools of yesteryear built their marketing philosophies around the four Ps of Product, Place, Price and Promotion. These are still relevant, but the ingredient in the marketing mix considered increasingly critical by marketing gurus Tom Peters and Bob Waterman is the people element, referred to by the cognoscenti as Relationship Marketing.
It’s interesting to observe parallels between marketing and personal development continuing to draw closer and closer together. Stephen Covey in his celebrated book, The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, refers frequently to the power of synergy in personal and business relationships. He also refers to the three phases of human development as going from total dependence on other people, into independence — which we often consider to be the pinnacle of development — into a final inter-dependence when we’re operating and managing relationships optimally. Relationship marketing is increasingly the only differential for companies operating in parity, over-traded or me-too markets.
I watch fascinated as one of this country’s business icons networks non-stop in a positive and non- manipulative way to introduce business people from diverse, disparate and frequently conflicting cultures and values to each other, with productive consequences.
There is an old Ethiopian proverb that says when spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion. The Japanese perspective is that a single arrow can be broken easily, but 10 tied up in a bundle cannot.
The lesson for South African business people, unions and politicians in 1995 needs to be that we must commit ourselves to being driven from a foundation of inter- dependence. The father of person-centred psychotherapy, Carl Rogers, said emotional maturity was heralded by an openness and transparency and a willingness to be vulnerable. Something which President Nelson Mandela seems comfortable being and doing and from which we, the unions and the business community, could learn.
If we’re to acquire and deserve international confidence and effectively market our country and our skills, we need to expand beyond the defensive, parochial little pigeon holes from which we’ve traditionally operated. We have to give up on that dreadful narrow-minded disease called institutional ego-centrism, or thinking that the universe revolves around us and our individual selfish needs. It’s time to develop and create an Afrocentric ubuntu marketing for what will undoubtedly be a watershed but, we hope and pray, also a successful, rewarding and mutually enriching business year in 1995.
ARTS