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True Marketing (True-M): A value based approach to business marketing by Jan Mattsson Professor of management Roskilde university Department of Communication, Business and Information Technology POBox 260 Roskilde Email: [email protected] Abstract This experienced-based paper is about a new moral and ethical approach to how one can practise marketing by considering the value priorities inherent in daily marketing work. This has been termed True Marketing (True-M). It is suggested that theoretical models from axiology (the science of values) can reveal the relative importance of different decisions and courses of action by analysing their value content. More important values must then be given priority. The True Marketing Ladder is a model of the nine basic value levels. It is suggested that marketing managers observe the relative importance of these value levels in order to apply True Marketing in a moral and ethical sense. Key words: Research paper, axiology, moral marketing, value 1 True Marketing (True-M): A value based approach to business marketing In search of a new marketing in business This paper is about a new type of moral marketing, True Marketing (for short True-M), which, I argue, must replace existing ways of carrying out business, and marketing alike. This paper will answer two questions: 1. Why do we need a new and morally based marketing? 2. What is the content of such moral marketing? I will present three models of True Marketing. I start with why there is now an urgent need for renewal, or put differently, a renaissance in marketing. The first section is therefore devoted to outlining some recent corporate scandals and mismanagement. Caveat emptor: let the buyer beware. This is perhaps the oldest principle of commerce. The more a salesman praises a product, the more in-depth you, as a customer, ought to check it before buying. The assumption is that there are hidden faults or unequal knowledge about the state of the product. In economic theory this is called information asymmetry. The salesman knows more and uses this knowledge to his or her advantage. Even Adam Smith was inclined to see businessmen as prone to colluding, or of other similar acts to enrich themselves. Translated into modern times we have the recent corporate scandals in US and elsewhere as illustrations as to why one should be beware of business practices. Customers, employees, shareholders, institutions are being cheated because of greed and wrongful actions by business. We see great business leaders who dramatically fall from grace. For example, Enron's former boss was once heralded as a business genius. Now, dead, he is dismissed as a villain. Other inappropriate marketing behaviors abound. Billions of unwanted messages known as spam are pouring into e-mail inboxes. Marketing messages of all kinds mess up important channels of information. 2 Executive greed takes new and spectacular forms. Normal perks are not enough. Top managers are not content with high, or rather super high, salaries to perform, they must also have extra incentives as stock-options and other performance-related bonuses. As response to the strong public reactions, Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, has seen the light of day. Not yet a coherent or practical program, it has nevertheless caught the attention of many multinationals. It seems to be the case that CSR is used only at customers. Big companies identify other stakeholders but do not prioritize them. Also, new federal laws in the US, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley act, has been introduced to stipulate what should be good behavior in business. It has been claimed by the Economist (August 28, 2003) that the essential features of corporate governance such as: weak boards, muted shareholder participation and sweeping powers for the boss, however, remain intact. Voluntary initiatives of coming clean from corporate greed and countering the mistrust of the public are in the making. For instance, in 2002 George Bush attended the opening ceremony of Business Strengthening America (BSA), an organization whose aim is to encourage civic engagement and volunteer service in corporate America. The No Logo website NoLogo.org is an extension and follow-up of Naomi Klein’s first book. The book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (1999) put the effects of Big Advertising and Brands into question. We were told that brands are made up of fictitious value of little importance. It was argued that global brands like Coca-Cola and McDonalds dominate their industry to the detriment of better alternatives. These brands project the wrong health claims and mislead the consumers. The “Supersize-Me” documentary has made a big difference to the image of fast-foods and McDonalds among the public. Increasingly, non-state, non-commercial and idealistic initiatives confront the global industries such as: Big Sugar, Big Oil, Big mining and Big Tobacco. Negative publicity has now become a global force to take into consideration. 3 All these examples show that top bosses, famous companies and global brands my be at the mercy of global negative publicity which may have strong, and immediate, impact on the market and value of the company. This is called demarketing. It is defined as actions or products by the company, albeit not directly coming from the marketing department, that damage brands or market position. So, in short, all employees are active in marketing whether they know, or believe it, or not. A financial scandal may have direct impact on marketing and sales, and not only on shareholder value and trust. This is why the idea of True Marketing transcends company departments and functions. A scandal may also brew from lack of moral considerations of work conditions among suppliers far away. The sweat-shop case of NIKE is an illustrative case. The bad work conditions for children employed by NIKE´s suppliers in Asia spilled over to damage the brand. The internet was used to spread the word around the world among the young users. The powerful metaphor “sweatshop” made the message clear; not only runners, but employees making the shoes were sweating! A number of “citizens portals” on the web invite the public to share information about corporate misbehavior and abuse. More and more, brands stand as symbols for the total quality of a company. Brands, in the view of customers, become the company. Hence, a de-marketing exercise can have devastating effects in the long term. That is why True Marketing is much more than just sorting out the mistakes in marketing work. True Marketing is the moral platform on which the company is based. It should apply to everyone, in everything they do. So, I say, dispense with all types of marketing fads. There is only need for one kind of marketing: True Marketing. Turning the Company Triangle on its head and the Loop of Identification: Two True Marketing models of the company 4 Most, if not all, companies have hierarchies. We can see at least three levels, even in modern peer-based service firms: top mangers or leaders, middle managers, and those employees having direct contact with customers. We call these latter employees the front line. Hence, we can imagine the standard company as an organization with three levels: top, middle and customer-contact: frontline. Top level leaders make strategy and plans. Middle level managers follow-up daily work and supervise employees at the frontline. The frontline delivers the actual service or work. Consequently, the frontline is what customers see. This is where marketing takes place. What the frontline does, or does not do, is what makes the difference. We can construe the power of (and in) the company from the viewpoint of customers as a triangle (See picture). Most employees are active on low levels of power, the base of the triangle. Above the low level, a number of managers supervise operations. At the top, a few leaders decide strategy. Much of what goes on in the interface (or base) between customers and contact employees is invisible for managers and top leaders. They are busy planning. To lead, they must take part in daily interaction with customers. This is where customer complaints, or new business ideas are heard. This is where work stress leads to unhappy employees or bad customer service. The base of the triangle is where the customer interaction takes place. It is the lowest level of status and power. Middle managers listen to the top leaders and attempt to act so as to fulfill plans they are given. In ascending order we have the formal power relations: customer, contact employee, middle manager and top leader. What about real power? Insert figure 1 here I suggest we turn this triangle on its head (See figure 1). The real power and importance comes from the customer. The interface becomes the first priority. Contact employees are the key; they should be supported to the maximum by what in services marketing is called “servant leadership”. By this it is understood 5 that middle managers should take active part in service delivery, and be a role model for what is considered excellent service. This is the second priority of the company. Leaders, finally, support by allocating resources and values. Leaders are the third priority, and should be supporting middle managers to help them become exemplars of the company mission. In turning the triangle on its head, metaphorically we place the real power in the hands of those delivering service. Leaders can tap into and direct real power only by being immersed in operations and by motivating employees to make the best use of resources. True Marketing needs a re-oriented power model of the company in order to work. The reason for this is as follows. Each power level of a company needs to IDENTIFY itself with the right, and true counterpart. This identification is a crucial feature, because without it, there is no directive force, or control, for true action to take place between counterparts. We can use a Loop of IDENTIFICATION as an image (See figure 2). Here is how I see it. First, top leaders must identify themselves with customers and other key stakeholders. Only then can they truly understand what is right or wrong in a moral, and for that matter, ethical sense. Giving orders to the organization is meant to direct action towards common goals. But these goals must be consistent with True Marketing, that is societal concerns. Next relation in the Loop of IDENTIFICATION is the one between customers and other stakeholders and employees. Customers should identify with the frontline employees doing the work for them. What can be expected from the offer? How can I as a customer be fair and do the right thing? The quality of the interaction lies in the quality of the offer. Identifying with the conditions of the workplace, and the quality of the organization (like the sweatshop example), makes it easier for the customers to become morally aware of what kind of suppliers on the market they prefer to patronize. Customers can make every choice a morally one. They should know what they get and want to pay for. 6 The third, and the final, relation in the Loop, is between frontline employees and top leaders. The frontline needs to identify with the top leaders. Why? Because they are employed to deliver quality work as specified in their contracts, by convention, or according to the aims of the company. They should report mistakes and correct them when possible. Understanding True Marketing, they know that they have a contract with the company as such, and not an individual top leader. This is where whistle-blowing comes into being, often a courageous act with many risks involved aimed at improving the company. The person blowing the whistle does this for a greater good, seldom for personal gain. So, now we have two basic models of how the company should be allocating power, and channel identification between the key parties of business, in order to make True Marketing work. First, I take an internal power perspective visualized by the Triangle, turned on its head. Second, I propose a reverse Loop of moral and individual identification to make moral choices easier. Let us move on to the second question: What is True Marketing? Insert figure 2 here First: A short recap of marketing history We know that marketing has developed over the last 100 years or so from economics, psychology and sociology. Marketing became a subject in business schools in the beginning of the twentieth century. Americans invented academic marketing and they still dominate the area. From being distribution oriented it evolved after the Second World War in the 50´s into “selling what we make well”. In the 60´s marketing took up the idea of promotion, market research and the 4Ps. The 70´s and 80´s see the introduction of the so called generic marketing concept and segmentation and positioning. It becomes the philosophy of marketers. 7 At the end of the 80´s the introduction of relationship marketing (RM) means that marketers focus on delivering a market-driven superior value to customers. The customer relationship becomes the focus instead of the transaction. The internet and ERP systems made inroads into marketing in form of CRM or customer relationship management. Now we know that the effectiveness of CRM is in doubt. RM is not a universal philosophy. Even if the aim of marketing is the create and retain customers we may need to “outsource” some of them because they are to costly to serve. As other functions in the company can be outsourced so can customers! Summing things up, much of marketing carried out the latter half of the 20th century concerned how to improve segmentation and adjusting the marketing mix to make marketing more effective by paying lip-service to fads such as: micromarketing, mass-marketing, mass-customization and one-to-one marketing. Further, poor implementation has been the problem with much marketing in the 80´s and 90´s. Where does this take us? Therefore it is indeed a paradox that the discipline of marketing has lost its relevance as a company function to be replaced by other disciplines, such as grand strategy, when people see a marketing dominated world in which consumption takes primacy and brands dominate as carriers of life values. There has been an age old (100 years!) debate about the divide between academe and practice. The debate has centered around the questions: Is marketing research of any use to practitioners? How can we make research findings improve the practice of marketing managers? The debate of marketing’s mid-life crisis centered around which duties to fulfill to its multiple stakeholders. Some people think that marketing as a function is dead. Instead, marketing should become more of a business philosophy. The “gapclosing” activity of marketing, between buyer and seller, is no longer needed with 8 increasingly sophisticated IT. Customers, it has been said, no longer want to make a choice between products (or services) modeled from market segment analysis; they want exactly what they want! IT driven customer tailored information can match offers to individual needs and preferences. Marketing definitions: What can we learn from history? Clearly, we need a renaissance in marketing thinking. This paper will contribute to this effort by introducing the idea of True Marketing (True-M). Let us start with the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) environmental definition of marketing ethics: “The use of moral codes, values, and standards to determine whether marketing actions are good or evil, right or wrong. Often standards are based on professional or association codes of ethics.” I will base the ideas of what I term True Marketing on axiology, the science of values (Hartman 1967; Hartman 1973). The book I wrote in 1990: Better Business by the ABC of Values (Studentlitteratur: Lund) outlined how one can distinguish between positive and negative values and which types of values are more important than others. So what I suggest is to define True Marketing as a moral platform for all marketing actions. Several contributions to marketing on axiology have already been published (Lemmink and Mattsson 1996; deRuyter et al 1997; Mattsson and Rendtorft 2006). The general definition of marketing by the AMA is: “Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.” The function and processes are supposed to deliver value and in return benefit the company and its stakeholders. This current definition carries an instrumental view of marketing, as did the earlier definitions of marketing, where the exchange between parties (narrow) was replaced by the transaction (more extensive). 9 As marketing came into being by the offering and wanting of something, all organizations and also individuals can be seen to engage in marketing. This was, at the time, talked about as “the broadening of the marketing concept”. Marketing was seen from the perspective of the supplier (seller) as an entity in control. However, early on, industrial marketing research saw industrial relationships as interactions, in which companies could not act independently. Relationship marketing, therefore could not be a managerial technique, as too many restrictions and complexity of the interaction processes made control impossible. I claim that much of the other different forms of marketing so far has been instrumental, and biased in favour of the company. I will replace the instrumental and company oriented focus of marketing. Instead, I aim at the individual employee carrying out the marketing actions. Hence, True Marketing is a moral platform guiding all marketing activities. True Marketing is not instrumental in a narrow way. It can be applied to all kinds of human interaction in business. Therefore, my definition of True Marketing reads as follows: True Marketing is being true to person(s), work and moral codes in all marketing activities of the individual. Let me start with the key word: true. What does it mean? True has several meanings according to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1990: p. 1267). First, it translates in to being steadfast and loyal. Also, as being honest and just as a person. These meanings refers to the character of the individual. Second, true can mean “that something is in accordance with the actual state of affairs” (Webster p. 1267). Obviously this means that there should be an accuracy between what is said (or written) and the physical fact or reality. Also, a true problem can have the connotation of being the essential part of the problem. Third, finally, true can mean typical, legitimate or rightful as in the phrase “our true king”. This translates into societal codes of right and wrong. 10 Hence, these three levels of meanings for the word True conform to the definition above as being true to 1. Person 2. Work and 3. Moral codes. This is the essence of the word true, or truthful. Let me explain further about the three levels and how they relate to each other by being different in importance and dimension. The levels of marketing Person level. Being true to yourself is a first must. It means that you, as an individual, must feel the action taken, or deliberated, is the right one for you. You ask yourself the question: is this action what my self should be doing? Does it feel right? Or, will I regret it afterwards? When deciding to take an action every person is of course restricted to what (s)he knows at the time and the ability at hand. Hence, we should take a relativistic view of True Marketing in the sense that persons are different and come from different cultures and traditions. We cannot expect everyone to act in accordance with moral thinking in the western countries. However, what is most important is to consider the intent of the person interacting with another person. The intent should be honest and transparent. Tell the truth as you know it! One need not reveal everything. This may damage the company. One should however, not only communicate the positive aspects with using the product or service, but also the negative effects that may happen. This does not mean that one should make the negative ones a major point, only that some of them needs to be understood for the best of all. Subtracting the negative value from the positive value of an offer the customer retains the surplus. If negative value is clear to the customer, then the surplus positive value is the true benefit derived from marketing. Hence True Marketing has taken place. 11 Another condition also has to be met in order for someone to have been true to his or her person, being true to another person. Does it feel right for me as a marketer to market the thing to that person? Can that individual really benefit from my offer as a person? Would I as that customer, and knowing what I do now, be ready to buy? Guaranteeing the value of an offer is a strong selling point. Any marketer who warrants the value in an offer by promising a pay-back if the customer regrets the transaction becomes credible. So, in short, the Person level is about feeling good about yourself and other persons. Only persons can have what we call feelings. That is why the Person level also is an emotional level. This emotional dimension has long been neglected in marketing. Now it is time to introduce it as a pillar of a new kind of moral marketing; True Marketing. Let us look at the next level of True Marketing. Work level. The work level consists of everyday work and physical reality in time and place. It is what you see around you in your home, office or work place and outdoors. All practical marketing work you do, making sales to customers, planning or carrying out promotional activities, designing products, writing copy for advertising, writing up market plans and so on belong here. The old saying: “if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well” is our leading star. Much of marketing thought has been spent on this level to develop instruments for marketers. Marketers wanted answers to the following questions. How can we make marketing work more effective? How are we to organise the marketing department? Where are we going to put our ads? How are we going to reach our customers? How can we group them into segments in order to become more focussed? Traditional marketing put great emphasis on making products different from other competing products. Features were important. The more, the better! A key point in market research was to find out which features really counted for customers 12 when they made choices between brands. Anticipating future customer needs and delivering them today was the winning formula. Marketing today faces many great challenges such as, internationalization and globalisation of business and markets, growing customer expertise and power, lack of market growth in many industries, and time-based competition. Innovation nowadays has to be speedy and continuous, driven by teams working across departments and functional specializations. There is no time to follow the sequential logic, market research, product design, product development, market plan, marketing planning and market launch and marketing audit. Everything in this sequence has to be done more or less simultaneously. Therefore the marketing function has become almost extinct in many companies. Now much marketing work takes place across functions and levels of the company and in collaborative ventures or projects between organisations. Hence, marketing work has taken a new integrative shape. It has become collective and collaborative. It has become intertwined with other activities, such as innovation or operations. Information flows within and across company borders in collaborative networks. Therefore it is time to make marketing more of a business philosophy than a functional discipline. As such, it is a close relative to the fetish of top management, Grand Strategy, the core domain of company leadership (Mattsson et al 2006). Making marketing more moral would also make it a contender to the priority of top management attention. Code level. What are societal codes? They are the agreed on rules of behavior. Rules are spoken or written messages using codes such as language or mathematics. These codes belong to a rational level of human life. Being rational is in Greek to have reason, or being logical (from Greek logos=reason). Together, these codes set up a system of principles of how to behave. As such they become moral restrictions because they relate to how an individual should 13 behave to other individuals, or to mental constructions like the family, company, state, government, and other organized groups of people. Thus codes are, in most cases, moral in that they relate to groups of people. Ethical codes, to the contrary, concern the individual only. Therefore, in this paper we will be using the code level to refer to human reason and how moral principles are followed by men. We have many different kinds of moral codes. Cultural traditions can be very strong and serve as forceful codes of conduct. Criminal and civil law set the boundaries for what is allowed in a civil society. Professional codes, such as the Hippocrates oath in medicine, define the essence of a profession. Religious codes are handed down through the centuries. Interpreting them from what the Gods in heaven have given men, scholars have given birth to the discipline of interpreting text, hermeneutics. The nature of a code, we must remember, is that you can either do right or wrong. Often there is no in-between. It is a bi-polar world we see. Think about the expression: “to tell a lie, but to tell THE truth”. There is only one truth, but many possible lies. Either a defendant is guilty or not. Therefore, as strange as it may seem, this third level is of least importance. The consequences of breaking a rule or disobeying a code may not be so bad. But it can, of course depending on the situation. Let us now flesh out the main principles of True Marketing by using the image of a Ladder. Each one of the three levels will be combined with one another. This results in nine combinations. Each combination will be a step on the True Marketing Ladder, the third model in this paper. The nine steps of the True Marketing Ladder Remember that the first level is about your own person and other persons. We now combine the Person level with itself and with the Work and Code levels into: Person-to-Person, Person-to-Work and Person-to-Code. These combinations are the three first steps of the True Marketing Ladder. 14 Let us start with the Person to Person sub-level: Step one. As a marketer you should feel good about your self and others. You are the vantage point of evaluation. You are the person feeling for your identity. These are the questions you should ask yourself. Are you feeling good about yourself now? Do you feel that you are in the right place to become a great person? Are you happy with the friendships you have created at work? If you feel happy and answer yes to these questions, you are experiencing a most important feature of True Marketing. It creates meaning for your self and other persons involved. Next we take the Person to Work sub-level: Step two. This is the same as feeling that you do the right thing, you personify your work. You can express your abilities into marketing work in such a way that you become an role model in a certain sense. Your personality is reflected in everything you do. I could exemplify with artistic creations or fantastic innovations. The artist, or advertising copy writer, or inventor is shaping work in an individual way. Creating becomes an obsession, and a way to express the innermost talents and identity. Great creative ideas are translated into physical form. This greatness comes from immersing yourself into creative and positive endeavours. Finally, we look at the Person to Code sub-level or Step three. This is quite different from the one just discussed above. Now we talk about your individual feeling about the codes you need to pay attention to in your marketing work. Are you feeling good about them? Do you have a clear conscience? Do you feel that you are a good and decent professional? Are you abiding with all or some of the conventions or rules of your marketing work? These are the questions you should think about. Naturally, some codes or rules of the game may be old or even outmoded. New convention come into being. There is no fixed set of rules. They may be absolute, or rather flexible. They come into being by collective agreement between peers on what constitutes good or bad, suitable or unsuitable behaviour. 15 Again, remember that the second level is Work. As above, we combine the Work with itself, Person and Code levels into steps four, five and six. Step four; Work to Person means that your effort in marketing should make a great difference to other persons. Marketing should have a strong impact on the individual as a person. How does this come about? An good example could be creative and enlightening travel that makes the customer a better person. In earlier times a pilgrimage was such an undertaking. Men made long and hard journeys to salvage their souls. Nowadays, even young people can sacrifice their sleep to line of overnight to get the first tickets to an Harry Potter film. Other examples are meaningful, but demanding education at top universities or schools and cosmetic surgery to restore a badly damaged face, and thus the personality, from a car accident. We see that good work is put into operation on the person as a self, or a symbol of the self, such as the face. It is not by accident that services directed at peoples bodies such as health-care, hairdressing, fitness centres and other beauty salons are held in high esteem by regular clients. Step five: Work to Work is a sub-level of tangibility. It is about doing good deeds in marketing. Practically the offer from the marketer should work. The product, as a useful thing, should give the results expected. “Use Pear’s Soap and you will Spear Soap” is an old English advertising headline which is a case in point. As a thing, the soap will last long. It will clean. Ease of use is a counterpart. AVIS ads say: We try harder. We work harder to give you the best service. Services and products should be easy to use, and hence practical. Also, products in use, should have the expected effect. We are overwhelmed by magic pills that are supposed to make us happier, healthier and slimmer. Many of these miracles cures are of course a joke. In daily conversations we often talk about quality when we want to discuss the content or effect of a product. Some products have more quality than others. They contain more of what we expect those products to contain. Let me take one example from the food area. 16 Sausage labelled “slimming sausage” in Sweden may contain water as the largest ingredient (slimming all right!). On the cover of the package all ingredients are mentioned in order of their relative size. Many consumers do not read these fine-prints. They know about calories and look at the front cover on which slimming is mentioned. The sausage contains few calories, hence good food for slimming! But, people, nevertheless, expect a sausage to contain more meat than water. They also take it for granted that healthy meat is included. This slimming sausage may contain other substitutes for meat, such as white flower from wheat, and injected salt to make it heavier, which may cause negative health effects. For instance, too much salt intake is not good for the blood pressure, and white flower is not conducive to a low GI diet. Consumers buying this sausage are mislead about the positive health effects of consuming the food stuff. The sausage contains cheap and empty food components. When consumers become aware of this misinformation, their trust for the food producer (and also perhaps for other producers) vanishes. Short term profits should not determine such important issues as building a the long term quality brand for foodstuffs. The marketer wants consumers to believe that the lack of meat and other healthy ingredients is really good quality. This is not True Marketing. Instead, an honest slimming sausage would be developed around high quality ingredients from perhaps vegetables such as peas or beans which would be, from a slimming point of view, even better than meat. The may point would be to combine healthy ingredients with nutritious input with slimming properties! Perhaps the even the concept of a sausage would be unsuitable. We may need to develop an entirely new food product. This product should be advertised as what it is, with the aim of building long term trust around the idea (and brand) of slimming the right and healthy way. In this way, we have applied the principles of True Marketing in designing a good product on the level of Work to Work. 17 Step six: Work to Code is a level of control of marketing actions. This can be summarized as “doing things right”. Remember what we discussed above, namely that “Doing the right things” is more important. It belongs to the Person to Work sub-level, you feel that you do the right things. “Doing things right” means that you follow rules and conventions in your work to make sure the quality gets right. All international systems of certification or classifications of products or services such as ISO and EQUIS, and so on, are built up around this sub-level. Companies should outline and make sure that they have procedures in place (here termed codes) to warrant how the work is carried out, and thus certifying content and quality. Other examples of True Marketing on the Work to Code level are the following. Your marketing work should follow the standards set up by the profession. Marketing plans should be executed effectively, and be in accordance with budget, or other constraints, such as moral guidelines for example the one put forward in this paper: True Marketing. A bottom-liner is the question if you are behaving morally true to your customers and other stakeholders. Finally, we must deal with the third level of Code. Combining it with itself, the Person and Work levels we get the final three steps of the True Marketing Ladder; steps seven, eight and nine. Step seven is the Code to Person. In essence, this can be translated to: treat people with fairness. This is as much about individual remuneration and salary, as classifying employees into different groups, into managers or staff, or seniors or juniors, or insiders or outsiders. These procedures of classification must be reasonable and just. They are the moral backbones of the company. Rules or guidelines must be seen as fair by everyone. This was termed Internal Marketing a few decades ago. Advertising was not only directed to customers and external publics, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to the employees of the company. The idea was that there should 18 be consistency between the messages sent to customers and employees in order to make the messages believable and enforceable. The Code to Person level creates professions in that a person is certified for a certain job. The requirements of the job are the criteria from which profession is constructed. We have many professions in modern society and we have in services marketing an area called professional services like doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, consultants, psychologists, teachers and so on. To belong to one of these professions you need en exam or degree and also practical experience to ascertain that you are following the standards of the job. More and more service jobs follow this trend to become professions in their own right. Is marketing a profession, or is it becoming one? Several functions in marketing have become highly specialized and knowledge-intensive such as marketing and sales of pharmaceuticals and the production of new forms of advertising. Hence, it is more than probable that marketing will follow the trend of professions. Step eight is the combination of Code and Work. We compare work with a rule or standard (here called code) and see if, and to what degree, they match. The more of mismatch in a negative sense, the worse we behave, or reverse the more of a positive mismatch the better we behave. This was the idea behind Taylor's scientific management. It has now modern counterparts such as benchmarking, business process re-engineering, Just-in-Time (JIT) and scenario planning all examples of the Code to Work combination. An overriding issue for marketing is to deliver the right thing on time. Hence a summation of this level would be: do what you promised on time. The idea is that promises made should be kept. Pacts, or agreements should be kept, this is the maxim of business. As the prime function of marketing is to make promises about offers to consumers, True Marketing on this level is to over-deliver in terms of promises made. This can make customers more than satisfied. Hence, modern marketing thinkers talk about delighting customers instead of satisfying them. 19 Delight, has a much stronger meaning than satisfaction. Delight is to give great pleasure or having extreme satisfaction. These expressions signal more of feeling than thinking. However, we then move up the ladder of True Marketing to the Person to Work level: Step two. The final ninth step of the Ladder is the combination of Code to Code levels. This means that we compare one code with another. Remember that codes could also be understood as rules or fixed schemes. They come about by rational reasoning. It is a bi-polar way to see the world; either as right or wrong. When we use this step of the Ladder we tend to think about the following: Are prices correct? Are the conditions of the contract according to law or rules? Have we made allowances for all costs? Is our paper-keeping in order? Hence, what is termed “creative accounting” is the non-compliance of traditional accounting. Many recent financial scandals have centred around this ninth step of the Ladder. A few examples. Chicago Sun-Times overstated its circulation. Soon afterwards, two of the Tribune Company's papers confessed to having done the same thing. The world's biggest car-parts firm, Delphi, also cooked its papers. These, and many other examples show that increasingly stiff competition on the market, and pressure from financial stakeholders, make it tempting to manipulate accounts to improve a bad economic situation. True Marketing means that all numbers must be correct as far as we know. In some volatile markets in may be very difficult to estimate or foresee economic developments. Fine. Nevertheless, the formula for how companies calculate their profits, assets, debts and value must be clearly communicated to stakeholders. This is especially important when these formulae are changed. Key words are openness and transparency in all accounts. Bad numbers may be explained but doctored numbers may not! A key issue in marketing is the setting of correct prices. What is the correct price? There are many ways to calculate product costs. There are also many ways to estimate what customers are willing to pay, or their value. There is also 20 the price differences between customer groups, or segments. For example, take the price of an airline ticket. The passenger next to you may have paid much more, or less, than you for exactly the same trip. How do you fell about that? What many companies fail to do is to explain to customers how they set the prices and what the benefits are for everyone. In essence, it is the real-time market situation for that flight that makes the price change from time to time. If this is explained adequately, customers will understand and take advantage of this to the benefit of all parties. Again, it is the openness and clear communication of the reasons behind the setting of prices that will resolve the issue. True Marketing on the ninth step of the Ladder is about being reasonable and correct to everyone. Summing up the key point of True Marketing I have now explained the content of the nine Steps of the True Marketing Ladder. Each step is as important as that of its number. Step one is the most important, and step nine the least important from the True Marketing point of view. Contrary to a normal physical ladder we start from the top and step down in descending order. To say it in another way, for many people money, or profit, may be the most important thing in life. True Marketing, however, puts Persons first, Work second, and Codes, such as money, last. A company practicing True Marketing will in the long term make money, deliver good products or services and have happy employees! True Marketing relates to Strategy and HRM as a universal grid of the priorities of the human realm of existence. One may as well use the corresponding labels for these scholarly fields, hence True Strategy and True HRM. 21 Figure 1 Turning the Triangle upside down Top leader Middle mgr Contact person Customer Contact person Middle mgr Top leader 22 Figure 2: Loop of Identification Top leader Customers Stakeholders Employees/Contact persons 23 References deRuyter, K., Wetzels, M., Lemmink, J., Mattsson, J. (1997) The Dynamics of the Service Delivery Process: A Value-based Approach, International Journal of Research in Marketing, vol. 14, no. 3, July, pp. 231-243. 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