In the excellent piece in The Marketer, Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, hit the nail right on the head when he pointed out that there is no B2B or B2C, just P2P – people to people.

Many years ago I worked in an agency where we had two teams, a consumer team and a trade team. There was a belief that somehow trade buyers were not fully human, they did not need to be engaged, amused or entertained – just delivered with facts. Fortunately those days are gone… well almost, but it is interesting to look at the swings and roundabouts of our approach to marketing communications.

There were once four ‘P’s in the marketing mix product, price, place and promotion: at the last count I saw one list of 14! But the fifth ‘P’ that was slipped in was perhaps the most important one, ‘people’. It’s strange how they were missed out of the first round.

Back in the heady exciting 50′s and 60′s when modern advertising was taking shape, there were two key drivers – the first was psychology. We learned that human behaviour could be studied, measured – up to a point, predicted, and thus hopefully influenced. The second, which came out of methods used in psychological research was what we now know as ‘market research’. Of course, there were many snake-oil salesmen hiding behind the cloak of science, but the precepts were sound and some great advertising was executed – even if some was of dubious ethics by today’s standards.

Something strange also happened. The theoretical base for much of the psychology came from the dominant paradigm of the times, ‘behaviourism’. People like B.F. Skinner had taken the view that we can’t see what goes on inside the mind, but we can see the behaviour that it generates, so that is what we should study and measure. Now this should have led to a fairly hard nosed approach – but what we see if we look back is a time of real emotional engagement – humour, pathos, empathy… all are evident. It was the ‘creative’ leap, where the process moved from the glass box ino the black box, and back out again.

In the decades since much has happened: psychology seems to have slipped off the agenda and technology has given us tools for even more detailed and finegrained measurement. And, with some very notable exceptions, people, humanity and emotion seems to have taken a back seat. Social media may have given bigger audiences, but real conversations are rare still. We send emails rather than pick up the phone – or better yet actually visit somebody.

The best communications still engage, amuse, entertain and persuade, but once again these seem to have become the preserve of the ‘consumer team’. People buy from people, people sell to people… people make decisions – even about buying widgets. Those people all have emotions, they smile, laugh, anger and cry. Perhaps every communications practitioner should have a sign over their desk – ‘It’s the people, stupid!’