Last Tuesday I discussed the value of marketing to small businesses and before that evaluated underselling marketing as a means to personal wealth.
This time I want to ask how marketing can bring about transformation of society. First, a warning: there is no panacea. There is no magic bullet that will instantly change things for the better. The neo-liberal worldview is almost universally dominant. In the UK the three main political parties have all bought into this worldview. Through privatisation they have sold off the sovereignty of Parliament and so seem unable to effect change through legislation.
The recent growth of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) is a joke. They perpetrate the same ideology, whilst recognising the helplessness of our politicians they believe it is membership of Europe that is the cause of loss of sovereignty.
We need a new politics that is pro small business, pro local economy, pro regulation and pro taxation. We need to re-democratise the economy.
Co-operation
This happened in nineteenth century UK through the co-operative movement. It was much wider than the retail co-ops and working people experimented with a range of Friendly Societies that lasted well into the twentieth century.
People understood mutuality and they understood what many people who are in business understand. To be successful in business you must collaborate. The idea that competition is somehow the means to wealth is one of the lies perpetuated by the neo-liberals. It is a lie taken for granted to the extent that almost all of society believes it.
When entrepreneurs set up in business they discover it is a lie. You can choose to compete for a small piece of the pie or you can collaborate to grow the pie. But make no mistake: pies do not grow in a neo-liberal economy. In 2008 the neo-liberal debt based economy collapsed. We’ve paid for their mistakes ever since.
“Who ate all the pies? Who ate all the pies? The Corporations, the Corporations, they ate all the pies. (And then they ate a pie.)”
Marketing can counter this prevailing ideology. Online marketing offers everyone an opportunity to get their message across using methods that a few years ago were available only to a small élite. If we can learn to collaborate, it may be possible to experience the mutual benefits our great-grandparents experienced.
You would think the third sector would embrace this approach and to a degree it does. However, the third sector has also embraced the neo-liberal worldview. The consequences are that much of what is happening is self-defeating and so over the next few weeks I shall look at third sector worldviews.
