The marketing world, in large part, can be split into two camps. Traditionalists, most notably Bob Hoffman at The Ad Contrarian believe that nothing has really changed except the tools. After all, while there has been a revolution in technology, basic human nature remains the same.
Digital advocates, on the other hand, are sure that the realm of communication has changed so completely that the old rules have lost relevance. They believe that the traditionalists are just fooling themselves, grasping at any straw in order to avoid changing their old, tired ways.
Having spent time in both camps, I have sympathy for both points of view. I’m equally frustrated with those who try to fit new media into old models and those who think that every shiny object represents a new paradigm. Nevertheless, it’s clear that something fundamental has changed and it starts with one of marketing’s most basic assumptions.
The first decade of the 20th century was ripe with new discoveries. Einstein had his miracle year, Mendel’s genetics were uncovered once again, Ford created his assembly line and the Wrights built their plane.
Still, to our modern eyes, life at the time was primitive. Most people did not have electricity, indoor plumbing or a telephone. Life expectancy was around 47 years and women did not even have the right to vote. We’ve come a long way since then.
In the 20th century we learned to master the physical world and discovered a strange, subatomic one underneath. These advances fueled a historic creation of wealth. In this new century, we will master the quantum universe as well as the complex, emergent code of our own biology and the benefits, as well as the dangers, will be even greater.
Management fads come and go. Core Competency, Value Chains, Reinvention and others have all had their day in the sun. Each had its merits and demerits, became overhyped and left us disillusioned until we found new promise in the next management craze.
Through it all, executives of every generation and industry have to manage and motivate their people, which is easier said than done. After all, control is an illusion. Good managers know that lunatics run the asylum and that their job is to help them run it right.
As the organization grows, it becomes a whole lot tougher. There’s less personal interaction, more formality and it becomes hard to maintain passion and purpose. Fortunately, increasing scale doesn’t have to result in a loss of momentum, but it does require less reliance on organization charts and a new focus on informal relationships.
In the classic TV show Dragnet, Sergeant Joe Friday famously admonished witnesses to give him “just the facts.” Generations of business executives have adopted the same approach, demanding substantiation rather than conjecture.
The problem is that the world is a confusing place and there are plenty of facts to go around. A quick Google search is all that is required to find the facts to support any argument. Studies conflict with other studies, contexts shift and the game goes on.
Yet even that far understates the problem. Even truths born out by rigorous analysis are often laid asunder by a rapidly changing world. Last year’s truths are often today’s red herrings. As rapid technological change transforms politics, culture and economics, we need a new approach that is based less on false certainty and more on simulation.
Starting a new business is hard. I should know. Over the course of my career I’ve started many, with varied results. I’m not alone either, about one third of businesses fail in their first two years.
Keeping one successful isn’t any easier. The average life expectancy for a company on the Fortune 500 has declined from 75 years to 15 years, so even the most successful business falter. There are no guarantees.
Nevertheless, some manage to buck the trend. Proctor and Gamble, 3M and IBM have all thrived for a century or more, prospering through countless business and technological cycles in widely divergent industries. While there is no silver bullet, every business needs to answer basic questions about how will they create, deliver, capture and maintain value.
Many people assume that evolution is about the survival of the fittest. It’s not. What really drives evolution is adaptation to changing environments.
That’s why our planet is made up of more than just one super-fit organism. Instead, we have a complex ecosystem. New things come in and displace old ones, but the old ones tend to stick around somehow. Some have survived for millions of years.
We can imagine sharks and algae thumbing their nose. For all the newfangled organisms that have come along in the past million years, they still thrive. To them, not much has changed. Yet it surely has. In much the same way, as old industrial giants are just getting used to the knowledge and information economies, a new hacker economy is emerging.
People like to say that we can send a man to the moon, but still can’t cure the common cold. It’s become such an enduring cliche because, in fact, there is some truth to it.
While the promise of new technologies like genomics and stem cell research suggest breakthroughs, a visit to the doctor is very much like it always was. We go in, a nurse checks our vitals, the doctor asks us some questions, prescribes treatment and sends us on our way. That’s about to change.
Much like other industries, technology is about to give healthcare a major makeover and no stone will be left unturned. Everything from examination to diagnosis to treatment is becoming a hotbed of innovation. While much of the medical establishment is skeptical, even obstructive, there are unmistakable signs that a transformation is underway.
It’s hard to imagine a more revolutionary product than the iPhone. Launched just six years ago, in January 2007, it has significantly changed the way we live. Go to any city street almost anywhere in the world and you’ll see people glued to their smartphones.
Beyond just the sheer human enjoyment, the numbers are pretty startling as well. By itself, the iPhone would be the most profitable business in the world and has the power to lift the entire US economy. to say nothing the vast ecosystem that has built up around it.
Amazingly, Steve Jobs was, at best, a mediocre engineer and Apple continues to have one of the stingiest R&D programs in the business. So where did the technology come from? How can we create more businesses like Apple? Or, for that matter, more Silicon Valleys and Research Triangles? The answers are as clear as they are surprising.
The marketing industry runs on heuristics, although nobody actually uses that term. Simple rules of thumb become axioms, which are then dressed up in a new, snappier shell and presented as insights. They are then recycled and reused.
They do, of course, contain grains of truth and so they resonate. They gain traction. Consensus builds around them and they propagate, under slightly different guises, through various agency frameworks and client marketing programs.
Unfortunately, as momentum builds, so does inertia and it becomes difficult to pivot or even evolve. Just as it used to be that no one got fired for buying IBM, no marketer gets called out for propagating conventional wisdom, even if the evidence doesn’t support it. Some of today’s most popular marketing concepts need to be rethought.
No one doubts that Leo Tolstoy was a singular genius. His novel, War and Peace , is considered one of history’s great works and another, Anna Karenina, was recently adapted for a major motion picture, nearly 150 years after it was written.
Famous lines such as “Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” the opening of Anna Karenina, show not only uncommon insight into the human condition, but a superlative talent for communication that spans barriers of time and language.
Yet if you would put an infinite amount of monkeys sitting at an infinite amount of keyboards, the problem of producing masterworks like Tolstoy’s would be one of curation, not creation. Up till now, the concept of infinite monkeys has been an interesting notion and nothing more, but amazing advances in artificial intelligence are making it a reality.
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