Customers are for life, not just your next bonus

There is a creeping malaise in today's marketing world; a sickness that is spreading not just through business but across many areas of life - politics, education, health broadcasting ... the list goes on.

The condition is short-termism in all its expedient, lazy, self serving and inefficient manifestations.

It is a condition which, if left untreated, will prove terminal, argues master strategist Martin Hayward.

Marketing culture today is impatient for success, short on vision and anxious to earn its own rapid reward, even if this is at the expense of others and a better long term solution.

As a host of competitive, international and consumer pressures force companies to run faster just to stand still, the focus is shifting from long-term health to short-term survival and, more worryingly, from the customer's interests to the company's.

'Customers are for life, not just your next bonus' presents the deadly dangers of short-termism and exposes the sickly state of marketing today.

But Hayward's hard-hitting message is not all doom and gloom. There is a way out of Quickfix Kingdom for companies willing to remove their heads from the sand and find and follow the route - however difficult it proves to be.

And it is the role of marketing departments to make the maps and lead the exodus, says Hayward, former head of the Henley Centre and now Director of Consumer Strategy and Futures at dunhumby.

Customers are for life, not just your next bonus' explains why marketing today is broken - and reveals how to fix it