The Future of Marketing

by Seri McClendon

When Clean Agency was launched two years ago, both co-founders wanted to "use our powers of marketing and design for good, not evil." Although our past work and experience had been on major brands such as Reebok, Oracle, Sega, Mattel Toys, TBS, The NBA and DirecTV, we were both frustrated with reselling the same products to an audience that didn€™t really need them and already had too many choices. How many choices of athletic shoes do you really need?

I always thought that there would be a need for an agency that could bring together sustainability, technology and creativity to each marketing communication assignment. Smart consumers have already started to question what is in their food, their air and their clothing. One cannot isolate these issues to one area of their lives; the prominence of sustainable lifestyles is rising, and this shift in lifestyle will lead to an increased shift in the way people are marketed to, and the way people buy things.

Technology has allowed more relationship marketing or one-on-one marketing to work successfully. But we have also found out that it€™s not just technology that builds consumers loyalty. Consumers still want a trusted brand, which needs to be built through customer service, company values and brand image. Today and even more so in the future, companies will become more transparent. Consumers will do more to learn more about a company from whom they buy their products. The future of marketing for Clean Agency is acting as a more effective liaison between these environmentally and style-conscious consumers and businesses and retailers who engage and support eco-friendly products and business practices.

There are smaller companies that have high quality, innovative products that are as good as, or better than, the major manufacturers€™. Many are still considered €œfringe€ or eco-centric. These companies will become more successful as we help them become available to a larger mainstream group that is not presently aware of their values-based products. Clean Agency has the values and the big brand experience to bring these products to a larger market. Organic food sales are on the rise, and, judging by the success of places like Whole Foods Markets, the movement has just reached its infancy. In the future, marketing will do more to emphasize the big picture benefits of this lifestyle. The community improves, the land improves, our meals improve and people€™s health is protected. Marketing for good will seamlessly blend with marketing for a large mainstream group, and smarter, sustainably-designed products will rise to the top.

Clean Agency believes these are exciting times to be in business, and that through helping innovative companies, marketing will leave behind the days of pushing semi-useful products on people who don€™t really need them, and bring good products, made by good people that are good for the earth, to the mainstream consumer.

Clean Agency, headquartered in Pasadena CA, was founded by Seri McClendon and Ken Eskenazi. McClendon is the strategic planner and client service lead. She has just completed a Masters Degree in geography with an emphasis in Industrial Ecology from California State University at Long Beach.