To reinvent marketing successfully, I believe we have to jettison marketing’s Persuasion Paradigm: the belief that marketing is ‘effective’ when it changes consumers’ attitudes and behaviours, and that this is what good marketing does.

Persuasion isn’t marketing’s only paradigm. The other paradigm is alignment – the belief that successful companies and brands align themselves to doing what their customers want them to do.

With very few exceptions, these two belief systems are contradictory and mutually exclusive. If one is right, the other one can’t be. If you are doing more persuading, you are also doing less aligning. And vice versa.

But today, elements of both are alive and well in marketers’ minds, battling it out for supremacy. This constant warfare isn’t helpful.

If we look at marketing’s history we can see why the two paradigms grew up. If you are an industrial age company driven by economies of scale in the production and distribution of products, the best way to make a product that sells in volume is to make one that customers want to buy. Hence the mantra ‘identify and you’re your customers’ needs’. Alignment.

But then, having made it, you’ve got lots of competitors out there and if you don’t sell what you have made, you’ll go bust. So, hell or high water, you’ve got to persuade customers to buy yours, and not your rivals’. Persuasion.

To the marketer, the journey from alignment to persuasion is seamless. There is no contradiction. They are all part of the same process of value creation.

But to the consumer, they are contradictory. “One minute those marketers are doing everything they can to change what the company does to add value to the customer. The next minute they are doing everything they can to change what the customer does to add value to the company. That’s two faced. Hypocritical, even.

This marketing schizophrenia lies at the very heart of marketing’s problems. The quest to reinvent marketing is the quest to reunify it around a single, central positive paradigm.

I think it’s possible. But some sacred cows might have to go!