Marketing could learn a lot from conservation science.
- There is virtually no marketing without media, and media is the habitat in which we operate as marketers.
- In marketing, attention is life itself. If we poison our habitat, conditions become unlivable. Attention dies out.
- Generative AI threatens a mass extinction event in marketing content—an invasive species taking over habitats and destroying resources like attention and trust.
- Recovering and restoring habitats is very difficult. The same is true for recovering lost trust or destroyed attention.
- Conservation science is value-oriented. It’s an ethical commitment. Marketing could pivot from resource extraction to conservation by prioritizing habitats and lives.
- Conservation science is also evolving. Dogmatic norms used to treat ecological collectives as valuable but not individual animals. They used to insist that anthropomorphism be staunchly avoided. They are now recognizing that individual lives count and that animals are more than just behaviors. The marketing parallel is to consider thinking, feeling, deciding individual humans, not “target audiences.”
- It’s simple. Change the inherent values of marketing to center the value of individual humans faced with a buying decision. Then change practices to follow suit.
