So much is happening with marketing today that it is hard to keep up. However the core innovation is the fact that marketers have learnt to address the customer collective, group, or community. They have discovered that the secret sauce is to message "group values" [see photo]. However. The real impact of this marketing ploy is that it shifts the focus from the customer[s] to the staff who serve them. It shifts the focus from customer service to staff pampering. It shifts the focus from doing business deals to marketing social memes based on collective not individual values.
What we have is an innovative alignment between the values of the customers and those of the staff who serve them. This means that every global product or service is wrapped in the values [ideology, theology, or group think] of the customer. The customers have become informal guilds. Meanwhile the staff who sever them are in catch-up mode as they are being schooled in the values of their target audience. So the new deal in business goes a little like this. Marketers create content that best fits with the customers' values while HR inculcates attitudes within staff that match those displayed by the consumers who ultimately pay their salaries.
To see this marriage blossom between HR and marketing is wholly unexpected [given the history of these two entities] but it makes total sense now that "customer service" is no longer a part of business success. Alignment between HR initiatives and marketing memes to customers is the way global business is being transacted today.
Those customers who seek to save the whales [see photo], to combat climate change, and to embrace the new realities of he, she, and they are being joined at the hip with the staff who serve them online, offline, or face-to-face. The new world order of business is aligning with the values of China rather than with the past traditions of democracies with free market trade. Where this will lead us is anyone's guess; but, we are headed down a path where marketing controls the business narrative and HR controls the staff.
Richard
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