Economy in a downturn, recipes in an upswing
By Dr. Peter Petrin, Vice President of Swiss Marketing (SMC) and Director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Business Economics (www.sib.ch).
Now even people in the remotest corners of the world know it: The global economy is in crisis. When sales of goods and services shrink, the number of good and well-intentioned recipes to get out of the crisis grows. The sales crisis is also being declared a crisis of values. A new sense of responsibility, a new management culture, a new business ethic, etc. are needed. "New" always sounds good, "innovation" even better. So how about value innovation?
Not everything that sounds good is necessarily beautiful. We marketers know that. I, for example, don't believe that we really need new values. Just as I don't believe that we can create the new human being. I believe that the values we need to follow have long since been invented. We just have to make use of them. It is not simple recipes or restrictions on freedom that will get the economic engine humming again. Growth needs movement and space. If we limit space and hinder movement by further increasing the number of restrictions and prohibitions, we will become increasingly entangled. I am not saying that social norms and rules should not be changed. New things can replace old ones. That has always been the case.
There is a demonstrable causal link between freedom and prosperity. The Enlightenment marked the beginning of a breathtaking success story for those peoples who acted in an enlightened manner. Of course, the increase in prosperity was not linear, but on the whole it went up more than it went down. Because people no longer just wanted to believe, they also wanted to know. It was not acting according to simple recipes and beliefs that got us further, but the courage to engage with the unknown and to learn. Today, we do not yet know how we will work our way out of the economic crisis. How about the following simple recipe: let's educate ourselves and learn. This will not immediately solve the problems we face. But we will expand our behavioral repertoire and thus the probability of productively shaping what lies ahead. The path to the future leads forwards, not backwards.
Not everything that sounds good is necessarily beautiful. We marketers know that. I, for example, don't believe that we really need new values. Just as I don't believe that we can create the new human being. I believe that the values we need to follow have long since been invented. We just have to make use of them. It is not simple recipes or restrictions on freedom that will get the economic engine humming again. Growth needs movement and space. If we limit space and hinder movement by further increasing the number of restrictions and prohibitions, we will become increasingly entangled. I am not saying that social norms and rules should not be changed. New things can replace old ones. That has always been the case.
There is a demonstrable causal link between freedom and prosperity. The Enlightenment marked the beginning of a breathtaking success story for those peoples who acted in an enlightened manner. Of course, the increase in prosperity was not linear, but on the whole it went up more than it went down. Because people no longer just wanted to believe, they also wanted to know. It was not acting according to simple recipes and beliefs that got us further, but the courage to engage with the unknown and to learn. Today, we do not yet know how we will work our way out of the economic crisis. How about the following simple recipe: let's educate ourselves and learn. This will not immediately solve the problems we face. But we will expand our behavioral repertoire and thus the probability of productively shaping what lies ahead. The path to the future leads forwards, not backwards.
