John Grant

John Grant has pioneered the evolution of marketing activity that considers its impact on the wider world. Building on his experiences of co-founding St Luke’s, the innovative and socially aware London ad agency, he wrote such books as The New Marketing Manifesto, The Green Marketing Manifesto, Co-opportunity and Made With. John has worked with organisations as diverse as The Body Shop, Ikea, Innocent, Forum for the Future and WWF. There’s no-one better to ask about where marketing is going as it seeks to find its role in a world of finite resources and social challenges, but which measures success in terms of economic growth.

Martin Williams: John, thanks for having a chat with me. Let’s start with the $64,000 question – is marketing the Devil’s art? 

John Grant: Yes, it can be, but I think it’s important to pick the question apart. I was at an academic conference about ten years ago talking about cultural trends or something, and somebody put their hand up and said ‘But isn’t marketing just selling us things we don’t need, and as an ex-Marxist I’m just really uncomfortable’ to which my response was ‘If you’re going to say that what my agency (at the time St Luke’s) is doing and what Saatchi & Saatchi are doing are identical, and we should just be put in a bag together and thrown into the river, then we might as well not have bothered trying to create a slightly better alternative.’ And that’s a persistent view. The New Economics Foundation, a couple of years ago, estimated that, whilst some professions, like being a nurse or a teacher, added greatly to the economy and the well-being of society, that bankers and (particularly) ad-men destroyed value in society, and [with] the glut of consumer waste and the sort of ‘footballers’ wives’ lifestyle, it’s hard not to blame marketing as being part of that. 

Certainly my conclusion on green marketing was that, it sort of splits. [If it’s seen as] just for the Greenies and it’s not for everybody, you need some ‘Devil’s art’ to create ‘a brand’ like Howies or Method or Green & Blacks that attracts people through traditional forms of shallow charisma, to do things that otherwise they probably wouldn’t have done. And then later on they sort of like the thing on the back of the packs saying ‘Actually this was done whilst supporting Fairtrade farmers’ and so forth, [where] you’re getting a gentle confirmation rather than getting ethics in your face. And so there are bits of it that just need the Devil’s art to make stuff fashionable in the way that the Prius became fashionable.

And [then] there are large swathes of it that are better kept out of that domain, and away from the dangers of greenwash, and are better founded in innovation, education and coming up with things which are more sustainable intrinsically, because they’re made of less, or last for longer, or have a different purchasing model, or other ways that are less damaging, or even positively restorative, and then educating people to change the pattern of their lifestyles - to get used to using city car clubs, or cycling, or whatever the shift is. [It] is an education process, and these days most things that are sufficiently innovative spread by imitation, between people, not from Levi’s doing an ad saying it’s cool.

But the marketing bit is the fraught thing, and before the eco debate, I’ve got books going back to the Sixties and Seventies by people with a Marxist, feminist, psycho-analytic persuasion saying ‘Advertising is creating a culture of envy and inequality in society’ – that would be John Berger’s view in Ways of Seeing, or Judith Williamson would talk about very selective examples of perfumes and sports cars and other iconic products that seem to perpetuate codes of sexism. Most marketing isn’t that – this is the argument I had with a chap at the WWF who was doing this whole programme on supporting values and common purpose, and I said to him ‘Look, the great majority of marketing budgets are spent by banks and mobile phone companies, and whilst they may even hire Hollywood stars, they’re not sexy lifestyle peripherals, they’re massive infrastructure service utilities; and they do want to fill the seats on their train or sell mortgages or other stuff, but its very different’. There are all kinds of sustainable questions, but it’s not possible to say that they’re wrong because they’re selling a ‘footballer’s wives’ lifestyle and aspiration, and they struggle when they do try to be aspirational.

The other big minefield at the heart of marketing and promotion and ethics is just the simple conflict between virtue and visibility; so talking about your virtue, going back to 18th century moral philosophy, as brilliantly illustrated in Dangerous Liaisons [when] John Malkovich goes and spreads coins amongst the peasants; it is very difficult, in a clean way, to talk about doing good. You can do it in a boring, constrained way to a select audience of influencers and say ‘Look we’re just being held to account for our principles and some other stuff’ but you’re still, at some level, in a world of mixed motives and potential hypocrisy, because you potentially falsify the very behaviour itself. If you become successful, because its ethical, do you continue doing it, do you stop doing it if it goes out of fashion?

There’s also a problem just beneath that which is a little bit more technical and strategic which is that marketing, by and large, even for those large institutional clients, is the process of selecting a few things which are sexy and better than everything else and highlighting them. So if you’re an Italian car company [you focus on] sexy sports cars that have a personality a bit like an Italian woman, and you don’t major so much on reliability. The equivalent in sustainability is that it’s all about highlighting the number of people who died in your crashes and setting out your programme to make less people die next year. And its intrinsically unsexy and it’s about the worst thing that you can do.

It’s been really hard for marketers and their agencies to get their head out of the first paradigm where they go ‘Oh brilliant – green – that’s really fashionable, and there was that Al Gore film. We’ll do something that kind of lightly airbrushes over [issues]’. For example, in the case of GE, where there were [genuine environmental questions] but I wasn’t going to address those and the best practice became ‘We’ve dealt with all the skeletons in the cupboard and now we’re ready to communicate’. When I got to that point with Ikea many years ago, when they said [to St Luke’s] ‘We’ve spent twelve years putting our house in order, how should we communicate it?’, we went away and came back with a very simple presentation with one word: ‘Don’t’. They said ‘Why?’ and we started spreading out ads like BP’s Beyond Petroleum and talking about the untold reputational damage that boasting about this issue could do, and the president of the company at the time, Anders Dahlvig, said ‘Thank God for that. We don’t do too many ads saying not many children died in our canteens either’!

Martin: It seems to be the way things are going. I was talking to Liam Black about this. Almost, the way to tell if a company is genuinely committed to positive behaviour is if they don’t try to get marketing capital out of it.

John: And people assume that Ikea, mostly because it’s Swedish, and because of the way it treats people at the periphery – you know, the fact that the men’s loo has nappy changing facilities, it seems liberal and Swedish – they assume that they’re doing quite a bit.  [But] they’ve got an unraveling disaster with timber, that they cannot fuel their growth and their business model without doing massive unsustainable damage because they can’t source enough sustainable timber. They came out and said that they were well behind on their targets, and their targets are very ambitious. And they’re investing hugely in smart new materials, and composites, and putting more air into furniture.

This is one of the things that’s difficult - as soon as you go out and say ‘We’re virtuous’, in most areas of marketing we take it with a pinch of salt. Stella Artois says its impossibly expensive and dreamy and like Manon des Sources in their advertising, but down the pub people call it a pint of Wifebeater, and probably on average the truth nets out somewhere in between. People can take both sides with a pinch of salt, particularly the one where they suggest that they’re incredibly premium and French, given that it’s brewed in Newport! But with ethics people just seem to have this polarized response where you’re either good or bad, so some brands like Nike and McDonalds have struggled with elements of their history where they’re just seen as all bad and they can never be seen as improving. Walmart is another one, and they’ve been quite progressive, given the size of the company and the markets that they serve, but it’s very hard for them to make progress.

And equally brands like Innocent - when they started working with McDonalds, they had people leaving in their droves, and leaving messages on their website saying ‘Thanks for all the smoothies’. I can remember talking to one of the managers at the time and he said ‘Where did people get the idea that we were perfect?’ and I picked up their bottle and pointed to the halo! But Innocent weren’t, for instance, organic, and nor could they afford to be - they’re expensive enough. But as soon as a company sells to Coca-Cola or Unilever and so forth it’s seen as having sold out, and joined a very different kind of story in people’s minds.

(Image: Michell Zappa (under Creative Commons))

Martin: If you’re keen to downplay virtue, do you think there can ever be any competitive advantage in behaving ethically?

John: I think that in marketing terms, it’s one of the few ways to anchor what you do in any kind of authenticity, credibility and trust. It may be just with your employees or people who are close to you, but actually its not really the flower, it’s more like the earth, and I think that can make a big difference. M&S [Plan A] really only reached a few elite people, particularly in supply chain or senior management, and there’s been a massive PR exercise and they’ve done some very cool promotions, like the Oxfam thing, but it doesn’t feel intrinsic to them. Waitrose and the John Lewis Group feels like it goes all the way down to the roots, and it kind of shows, and it shows up in my trust, when they talk about blacktail eggs – if I saw that in M&S I’d think ‘Oh for God’s sake, that’s just another way of charging me double for something standard’, but they have a bit more license and it makes them feel contemporary, and it makes their food feel fresher and more premium, and less corporate and less processed, and so I think you can argue that, for them, it’s been a source of competitive advantage. 

Walmart’s CEO described it as a once in a generation opportunity for redemption, real corporate redemption. I see that, from a distance, working, in terms of blogposts saying ‘I’m surprised because I never would have expected to write something positive about Walmart but here goes…’ on things like Treehugger or the Huffington Post.

I don’t think it is a simple source of the marketing steroids that sports sponsorship and above-the-line advertising and things like that feed into, which is this sort of model of ‘We’re famous and shiny and jumping out of a jet above the atmosphere and look at us’ - it’s just not that kind of thing, and when you turn up the volume to make it that kind of thing, I think it kind of feels awkward, like when Honda painted their [Formula 1] car with a picture of the Earth and took the sponsorship off, that just felt like tattooing a baby with a brand or something. It just felt kind of difficult. Where sustainability can drive competitive advantage, I think, is around culture, driving new forms of innovation, massive cost savings - you know, when somebody like Kraft can stand up and say ‘We saved a third of our packaging costs moving to more sustainable models, and consumers loved it because it was more sustainable’. And things like transport costs - I think now most of the Ikea furniture that you buy in Europe is manufactured within Europe, which is a huge shift from ten years ago, and has a massive fuel and transport saving, and even financial savings, in terms of the time between buying the materials and selling the products is shortened. And reputation is the difficult one in that mix, because it does inoculate corporate reputation and can protect you, to a certain extent, from being the next target of activists, if you’re seen to be genuinely doing enough of it, for the right reasons.

But you have to be twice as good as anyone else because people expect your products to be crap, so you have to be twice as good on quality. But having said that, one of the huge advantages for smaller up and coming businesses is your ability to attract really talented vibrant people that can just make your company run circles around Procter & Gamble in the same way as attracting young talent to tech start-ups can enable you to take on the AT&Ts of this world.

Martin: You seem to be saying that marketing is inherently persuasive but how it is then used is the defining factor as to whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. Is that essentially right?

John: Well I don’t know, the difficulty about calling it the Devils art… we live in a  world which is profoundly mixed and plural, and fair and unfair, and where we’re all implicated and responsible in the fact that we have a lot more money than the people we’ve locked outside our borders, and as a country seem quite capable of voting for UKIP to keep it that way, in a way that may be economically and culturally counter-productive. But the danger of ethical debates, including environmentalism, including race and multi-culturalism and so forth is that you allow a polarized and, in a way, quite republican discourse to live where everything is all good or all bad, and you end up with a small group of people preaching to the converted, and a whole load of people being disabled by the fact that they’re being labeled bad so they can’t deal with the issue. [It’s ] just like if you tell people that they’re bad parents if they go to work, you just end up alienating a huge part of the audience and creating a very polarized tabloid style of debate, and I think the more mature perspective is that we need the Devil’s art as much as the angelic figures of heroic grace in the mix of normal life so that we can have a mixture of things that we can all live with. 

I’ve always thought that ethics ultimately comes down to what you choose to do every day and down to really small things for the global economy. In simple terms, what you choose to work on, who you choose to work with, what ideas you put forward, how you conduct yourself, and how you treat the people around you are much more within your sphere [of influence]. Few of us are president of the world or in any meaningful way can advise people who are. And ethics are ultimately a guide to decision making. Where we’re not making decisions you’re only left with posturing or polemic or something else beginning with P – you’re not actually affecting anything.

Martin: So if we’re all screwing up the world, and there are corporations out there that only care about the bottom line, can anything be done to make them act more ethically?

John: Well I know a lot of people in the NGO sector who think that the only thing that ever brought them to heel was the threat of losing their licence to operate and the colossal [reputational damage]. There was someone whose guitar was broken by United Airlines – Dave Carroll was the protester, and the airline wouldn’t listen, so he made a country and western video called United Broke My Guitar and ended up [affecting] their share price, at which point they would have bought him the town of Nashville just to stop it.

There’s an argument along those lines by an academic called John Keane who says that, unlike Jeremy Rifkin who wrote a book called The Empathic Civilization about the fact that we’re all in this global social consciousness [and] care about each other as if we were a family, at a time when fairly large scale quantitative studies suggest that empathy is actually declining as a trait and that people are a bit more out for themselves, particularly in America; what Keane said is that we are moving into a period of continued concentration of power in a few political and commercial interests that are trans-national and therefore almost above any law by virtue of floating between places where they can choose on a simple level whether to pay tax and are constantly being nipped at the heels by regulators over things like anti-trust and other monopolistic practices, and the same is true of politics. But what he introduced was the idea that we are not moving to a more representative or more egalitarian form of democracy but towards what he called ‘monitory democracy’, which is the fact that even in Britain, which is the country with the most CCTV cameras of anywhere in the world, we still have three times as many cameras in the hands of citizens and we are able to watch the world and we are able, since the Rodney King video, to point out when things are being done by the police that are wrong, and we are increasingly able to publish and read things like Wikileaks.

Somewhere in all that, without suggesting that every company needs to experience its own Arab Spring, there’s also something much more subtle and internal to those companies which is that there is a big gap between whatever actions are being taken at some level, often with very little room for manoeuvre given the financial demands of being this sort of infernal growth machine.

However if you look into the operating cultures of large companies there is a continued move from 1984, George Orwell, alienated, bureaucratic, rational,  management science to a continuing  humanistic revolution, the latest chapter of which has been the mindfulness revolution, where you see executives from major companies being taught Buddhism without Buddha, to be mindful and kind and to empathise with others, which you expect to be happening in a class tonight at a community centre up the road, but you don’t expect to be happening in those places. I’m one of those people who is slightly ambivalent about spiritual development as a means to management effectiveness, and that is not quite my cup of tea, nor is the implied conformity of you know, ‘Let’s all chant the success of our brands’ side of it, but I think it is a much more mixed picture inside large companies.

I remember having this conversation with Michael Braungart, the German guru who not only co-wrote Cradle to Cradle, but is a leading expert in toxicology and in helping the EU ban bad things that shouldn’t be in things around us.  I said that in my experience of large companies, they’re a mixed bag, there are strong and weak leaders and an imperfect amount of information, so in cases of companies being caught out, they often didn’t know. I don’t think [a well-known jeans manufacturer] knew that when they went to a wholesaler and kept banging the table and saying get us a better price, that they would end up having their jeans made in Chinese prisons by slave labour. They simply didn’t ask the question, they didn’t have oversight.  That was my slightly liberal view; his view was ‘I agree with that too, but I think there are about ten corporations in the world that are evil and hellbent on destroying everything around them for some sort of ideology that is clearly evil, as measured on the general effects on human wellbeing’. But I’m more in the ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’, ‘see the good in everybody’ side.

But we aren’t changing course, not enough, to the effect that there is a profound simple truth in the number of homes that get flooded, and food shortages and so forth, [and] then having to get used to the idea that there may be some things wrong with the world, rather like an individual person being confronted with a life-threatening illness, we may just have to react as best we can to whatever is coming down the pipeline, whether we see it or not.

Martin: You mention empathy there. I was talking to Richard Hall and he said his wish for marketers is that we become more empathetic. I think one of the things that lies behind this public suspicion of marketing is a fear of control, whether that’s coming from ‘Big Data’, or psychological insights, or whatever. In the New Marketing Manifesto, you talk about authenticity – I wonder if that’s the kind of thing that’s redressing the balance between advertisers and consumers. 

John: I think five years ago I would have sided with the view that actually a lot of what is wrong with marketing was control, and most branding discussions are an attempt to control and corral and to some extent tidy the universe, but also dictate what people think and do, and edit choice. But the difficulty is, if you look at management, for instance, as an analogous subject, there are a mix of things that from one angle can be described as control and from another angle can be described as leadership. The ones who are utterly open and don’t have that ethic of wanting to bend the universe to their own version of reality, actually drift along, all the boats rise, and they often do very well in the long term because they’ve staked less, but certainly the study of companies that are built to last by Collins and Porras, looking at companies that lasted hundreds of years, suggested that having big hairy audacious goals, and actually daring to disturb the universe – and it goes back to the ‘Devil’s art’ point – every positive tendency has a shadow, and if you deny that, you end up with this sort of New Age wishful thinking, or idealistic or utopian thinking. And if all you see is the shadow, you end up with a problem as well, but the ambition and extroversion and the desire to foist ideas on the world, and to change markets and get people doing new things, is what gives marketing all of its energy.

And one version of this debate, which I had to work out where I stood with, was this whole thing about prosperity beyond growth, or prosperity without growth and the post-growth economy, and I sort of buy that, because empirically, at least, if you measure growth in resource use, we can’t continue growing resource use, so if you measure it in barrels of oil, that has to be true; that whether there is a peak oil supply or not, use of that kind of energy has to tail off. But the difficulty is when that’s conflated with individual companies. I was in meetings where consultants would say to companies ‘You have to stop growing’ - well they can’t; it’s like telling a human being they have to stop eating, and whilst some of them may survive for some time with fairly static market share, and finding new ways to become more efficient or in other ways feed the ambitions of the people who have invested in them expecting a return, [most can’t]. The way I resolved it in the end was to say ‘Well look, it’s a great big forest, and the forest can’t grow, and it needs to be managed, and as new things grow, other things have to be chopped down and that’s government and society’s job, and it’s all one big common, so its our job too’. But you can’t tell trees not to grow, and all thriving organizations are growing. So [returning to] the control thing, I’ve come back to the marketing way of seeing the world as something where it is proper to try and express influence, and have a point of view and be creative and try and push boundaries, and I think you need to be a little more aware of the broader context in which you work.

The empathy point - that’s just such a big and long discussion in itself. I saw a really good talk by a South American philosopher, and I think entrepreneur, called Bernado Toro, whose key concept is that we as humans have to adopt the ethic of care; currently we have lived for some time with the ethic of competition, [but] we have to adopt the ethic of care or we’ll die, we’ll all die. I saw this in the context of working with Natura, which is a very brilliant and growing and successful commercial company, with a strong ethic of care, and well known as an eco brand globally, almost from their name but also in the way that they’ve worked with communities in the Amazon. One of their founders said you can’t run a healthy business in a sick society and they’ve seen it as their job to go out and do things about it, where it’s relevant.

Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop (Image: BBC)

Martin: What about the view that marketing is empty and only about the bottom line? As we’re talking cosmetics, you were addressing this when you worked with Anita Roddick and the Body Shop.

John: Well, The Body Shop and Benetton were the two companies in the 1990s that pointed out the very obvious fact that you could be political as a brand and have a point of view that was political, and in fact when Benetton was asked about this he said ‘What are you talking about, all fashion is political it’s just that I don’t share the politics of the rest of fashion’s subscription to thin models’. 

There is as much marketing money in the UK spent on sales promotion as there is on the above the line stuff that most people think of as marketing, the advertising, the websites, the banners. So a lot of it is transactional – ‘2 for 1’ is part of the marketing world and [that] has its ethical questions. I read a report on the grocery sector saying that their volumes of sales had fallen 8% and the analysts – it was a sort of round table report by a management consultancy –  the consensus was that it was because we had learned to waste less and actually we are buying less food because we are eating more of it. So it’s not like nothing’s improving.

Some of marketing is relentlessly shallow. I’m attracted to the parts of marketing that are anything to do with pain points in people’s lives, and improving people’s lives. And that could be shaking up the whole culture and getting it to look at things differently or it could just be a simple service innovation or a different way to order something that helps people, and that’s where I think the empathy in marketing can come from. The stuff that’s driven by the need to sell 3% more than last year will always drive towards something which is superficial in intent, even if in execution you end up creating the campaign for real beauty or anything else. If your actual products aren’t based on the philosophy that Anita Roddick’s were, then there is always ultimately a limit to what you’re really about.

Martin: The beauty industry is always seen as creating problems and makes people feel bad, especially women, in order to sell more products. And The Body Shop isn’t in that place.

John: Well it wasn’t, and I was reading their annual report last year just to see where they were and there were a lot of people who were very convinced and articulate about Anita Roddick’s legacy. You used to go in The Body Shop in the Nineties and you’d be confronted with a petition to free Nelson Mandela or against animal testing, so it was a campaigning organisation with products; it was more like Oxfam’s trading philosophy and it’s hard to see [if] that is [still] there. My only current experience of that is working with Natura, in one of the biggest beauty markets in the world, and boy are people really beautiful in Brazil and South America - and its important, its part of the dance of life, how people do their hair or feel about their bodies, and its not seen as demeaning or objectifying. And they, and some other brands in their market, have very much taken a natural beauty line, which apparently is not promoting the same difficulties and problems that would be leveled at some of the big American, Japanese or other beauty multinationals.

I don’t want to live in a world where everybody wears flat shoes and we have no sense of beauty or that very South American romantic view of beauty. I’ve never bought the Dove manifesto. I see it as being a fantastic marketing positioning, and I’m not saying that any one individual there isn’t committed to it, but they just live within a holding company that also sells Lynx, and is all about objectifying women, and I’ve had this argument with the previous sustainability head at Unilever who says ‘No, we produce brands that, whilst they each appeal to their target audiences, none of them are based on exploiting insecurity, and that’s the real ethical basis of what we do, whereas our competitors will produce things that are all about exploiting your guilt as a mother, or your hygiene obsession as a housewife, or other things that are neurotic, and we only go with the ‘Dirt is good’ world of typical Unilever brands.’ I like the message, and I met the brand head for Dove and they seemed very passionate, very go-getting, very innovative. So I don’t want to say that what I do is any better than what they do, but I think there’s something simulated about campaigns to drive participation about that brand that doesn’t feel like it came from the same place as an authentic business that was wholly aligned with that, where everybody went to work in the morning because they love doing that kind of stuff.

I have the softest spot for companies which are passionate about what they do. And it might be going back to what you were telling me [recently] about Fifteen, that [their primary focus] is the food. People that really love design, or really love technology, and even though those are the quieter, less obviously flashy ethical poster boy companies, they seem to have a real kind of substance to them, and they arguably very often do have more effect on our lives.

Martin: It’s back to the authenticity thing.

John: Yes, that was the Greeks’ view, that being true to yourself, and knowing yourself in quite a full way, was the only anchor to all of this.

Martin: One of the themes throughout your books is that marketing can be an engine of positive change. How do you think marketers should approach that challenge?

John: Well, there are two things. One is a personal bias. I have a personal bias for ideas that are creatively original, whether or not it’s the commercial, best thing to do. And I have a personal bias to ideas which I think add some value to the world, and it doesn’t have to be that they reduce carbon emissions, it might be just that they make the world a nicer, or more creative or freer, more free-range sort of place for me and my loved ones to be in. And so people either have that bias or they don’t, but if they do, then I’d argue for bringing it to work where possible, because we all work within constraints. Cause-related marketing comes in and out of fashion and I still think, that ultimately, and maybe this is the heart of your empathy question – both the current and the previous CEO of Microsoft have said publicly that they get out of bed every morning because of the amazing potential of software to improve people’s lives. I think if you work in that kind of business, where you love what you do and see it in the service of meeting people’s needs, you cannot go far wrong. I met someone in a big bank who had come from a regulatory background, and [was] appointed by the bank to be their internal challenger and go around and look at every bit of their organisation and say ‘Does this look like it was invented to exploit customers or does this look like it was invented to serve customers, but done so in a responsible way so we can make some money doing it? And if it’s the second one, that’s the model that we want everywhere in the bank; and we don’t want to be exposed, we don’t want to be criticized, and we don’t want to be hauled up in front of MPs for doing things that are often thoughtless or conventional, we want to be doing something that we think is decent. We think people need the service of banking and it enables them to do things they need in their life, and we want to be in that business.’

[Then,] I think in much broader ways as a human being, the anvil that you hammer your ethics and your contribution to the world out on is something like the word ‘service’. There’s that slightly sort of Sufi thing about not being quite so constrained by your ego, but the idea of service and being devoted to anything other than your next pay rise or your next story in the trade press, but actually seeing yourself as in the service of other human beings is really liberating and empowering and energises people and leads them to do all kinds of great things. I’m trying to sell it on that basis, but I think ultimately it’s good for you, and at the end of the day, when you sit back and look at your life’s work, if it’s been in the service of something, you will end up feeling that you’ve left something worth doing behind, as opposed to just a series of humorous lucky escapes and get rich quick schemes.

Martin: A perfect place to end – thanks John, really appreciate it.