The Marketing Ethic in Community and Economic Development

​While in business school, one of my professors would serially preach that "without marketing, there is no business." As our class would learn, marketing is not merely reducible to advertising. Though often conflated as the same, advertising is an activity of ​marketing. 

​My professor furthered his lecture by providing an overview of the "marketing concept" over time. Beginning in the Second Industrial Revolution, businesses, operationally driven by mass production techniques, adhered to "product-oriented" marketing, that is to say, that "whatever we produce, consumers will consume." The next shift occurred in the early 20th Century  where enterprises focused on a "sales-oriented" approach to marketing which identified sales strategies at the key determinant of consumer decision. The mid-20th century brought a more data driven approach toward marketing with the emergence of the "customer-oriented approach" , which is essentially allowing the consumer to guide product design and delivery and employed qualitative research techniques such as surveys and focus groups. 

​Our current epoch, still within the framework of the customer-oriented approach, embraces the platform of corporate social responsibility, which appeals to the long-term well-being of consumers. Termed as "societal marketing", this is the most recent shift in thought among corporate marketers, or hunters of market share. From Tom's Shoes to Target announcing gender neutral sections, this approach is becoming ingrained in the mainstream corporate strategy for retails and service providers in the marketplace. 

​In the same way that for-profit corporations and smaller enterprises learned over time to modify their service delivery and product design to accommodate changing customer tastes and circumstances and to increase their level of forecasting accuracy, it seems that, in my view, not enough entities in the public service sector, whether governmental or non-profit,  continuously embrace the urgency of  the customer-oriented view in their service delivery. 

​Many good professionals, young and old, often become stagnated in or frustrated with the community they serve. Underserved and low-to-moderate communities certainly come with their quirks and challenges, but that is no excuse to settle.  When pressed, I constantly remind myself with a rhetorical question, "Would Apple be satisfied with statement  'the people don't care about iPhones anymore?' " When I'm stuck, I ask, WWAD, What Would Apple Do? 

​Because economic and community development is  an academic topic and there is good secondary research that confirms general trends about certain demographic characteristics, many professionals tend to follow the safe and establish route of program design and service delivery. While there is virtue and value in stable, longitudinal, sustainable programming, we know that programming has to grip fit the needs of the communities we serve in order to achieve the highest efficacy. We have to translate our affection for corporate disruption to our work.

​We have to personally, eye-to-eye, ask the community first what there needs are and how they would best like us as professionals to delver them. This task is not easy. Many evenings I have fretted over low workshop registration numbers and disinterest in marginal cosmetic improvements. Many times we fall in the to fallacy of the "product-oriented" concept, pumping out homogenous, mass-produced  workshops, seminars, and loan products that are to just "check-the-boxes" and to not capture the motivation of the community. 

​Good data is the bedrock of good decisions. Without it, there is no chance to develop an efficient or efficacious strategy. Beyond the numbers, we have to exert creativity to match the numbers to the need. And after we attained, measured, evaluated, and reiterated, we have to, as the old colloquial wisdom says: 

​"Do something you've never done, if you want something you've never had."