Let us organise against marketing degeneration, Nsarkoh
By Tunde Animasaun
Yaw Nsarkoh, former Executive Vice President, Unilever Ghana and Nigeria, Independent Marketer, and marketing regeneration crusader has called on marketers to organize and counter the evil of marketing degeneration .he made this call in his presentation at the MARKETING EDGE Quarterly Marketing Summit held recently.
Nsarkoh who was the lead speaker at the Summit submitted that unless marketers rally behind the banner of rejuvenation and self-rediscovery as professionals, the marketing profession will lose its essence as one of the core professions for the development and advancement of humanity.
“We must return Marketing to its human and humane origins. Or else, we will create the kind of society which my brother Dr. Mzamo Masito once described with the following observation. ‘The poor do not sleep, because they are hungry. And the rich cannot sleep because the poor are awake.’”
The marketing regeneration advocate believes marketer as currently in a myopia foisted on the profession by the apostles of consumerism and Neoliberal Capitalism.
“Make no mistake about it”, Nsarkoh, warned, “there is a red-hot battle taking place for the soul of business, of management and of marketing. One of the most vocal of the intellectual high-priests of Neoliberal Capitalism, the Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, revealed this when he barked in 1970 in an essay tellingly titled, 11Social Responsibility of Business, that: ‘There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources to engage in activities designed to increase its profits.’”
Rallying marketers behind the regeneration banner and calling them to the very essence of marketing in its pristine form, Nsarkoh who titled his paper, Avoiding The New Marketing Myopia – Returning Marketing To Its Noble Roots said, “In the name of so-called “Performance Marketing,” Neoliberal Capitalism has produced a very objectionable, interminable, and often unethical brand of marketing. We must all come together to stop this rampage.
“The celebrated management writer, Henry Mintzberg, in a remarkable article titled Managing Quietly, published in 1999, was courageous and stark in pointing out the dangers of Neoliberal Capitalism. He used other terminology, yes – like globalization, shareholder value and so on – where some of us just denounce Neoliberal Capitalism. He was very sure-footed in his pronouncements, and wise. I would therefore like to spend some time on some of what he wrote.
“Professor Mintzberg warned that: ‘unless (American business) gets off its destructive kicks – the mindlessness of managerial groupthink, the mercenary ‘me’ of shareholder value and executive compensation, all the noise and the hype – it will be in deep trouble. So much of this activity is deadening and just plain socially bankrupt.”
Concluding his daring and ‘no holds barred’ paper against the forces of marketing degeneration, Nsarkoh said, The Marketing profession is at a critical juncture. It must end all signs of a new myopia – the endless capacity of Neoliberal Capitalism for submerging ethics and values, in pursuit of profiteering. Marketing must return to its original noble roots – roots that made the profession a clear and distinct servant of the human race – a true force for securing the long-term health of society.”
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