At some point, marketers are vilified for creating demographic categories to market to – as if the impersonal transaction is our sole purpose. I was talking to a Commercial Development appraiser and he raised his eyebrows at the validity of talking about GenX or Millennial demographics and psychographics – their emotional drivers, behaviors and traits.
I can understand why. First of all, it’s irrelevant in his field. I imagine he spends most of his time studying the local market, looking at national and global industry trends, and following the money. In his case, the human behind the money is less relevant. I asked him if there was any part of his job where he felt he still had faith in humanity. “Well”, he responded, “I guess the fact that I helped a local arts studio successfully renegotiate property in town, against all odds, has restored my faith. And I got free performance tickets to boot”.
We have a human deficit in our capitalist model. We like to refer to our paradigm shift as a focus on the “human” bottom line. Of course, others refer to it as conscious capitalism. But I don’t know whether to embrace this concept for all the good it touts, or doubt it based on John Mackey’s reckless remarks. (He likened Obamacare to fascism and slammed believers in climate change…)
In our evolving field, where we bridge humanity at work, we are moving away from a transaction focus and toward deeper, meaningful relationships at work. Our society doesn’t monetarily reward those of us who aren’t astute business persons – because the idea behind capitalism is to make money to live and buy stuff. And an even bigger problem than that? It takes a lot of money to make a lot of money.
So we scrape by, project by project, trying to figure out how not to ‘lose ourselves’ to a singular bottom line focus, or to stress from paying bills that exceed our income, while helping large companies understand that they will positively impact their bottom line if they focus more on human capital and less on financial capital. Of course, when I spell it all out, I imagine it sounds ridiculous to some, and noble to others.
Noble usually means you are willing to give for no gain – so as an entrepreneur, maybe that’s not a good business model!
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