We’ve entered a new marketing paradigm. Social media, co-creation and mobility are all part of it, but the greater whole is a new understanding of how consumers and brands interact in a digital world.
As I’ve written before, paradigm shifts do not automatically nullify time honored principles, but must adapt old wisdom to new facts. Therefore we must not only innovate forward, but integrate back.
Therefore, the post-promotional age does not eschew promotion, but embraces it. Firms are in business for profit and ignoring that fact risks either throwing money away on silly “conversations” or alienating consumers by patronizing them. However, brand centricity is giving way to consumer centricity and that makes all the difference.
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When Steve Jobs passed away last week, we lost more than a legend. He completely changed the way we see technology. Out went clunky gray machines and in came beautiful, friendly devices.
He leaves an astounding legacy, including the company he co-founded, got kicked out of, returned to and ultimately came to personify. It’s no wonder that Apple shares dropped 5% when he resigned in August.
On the one hand, he leaves the company firing on all cylinders, with no debt, a market value of almost $400 billion and a product line that makes competitors go green with envy. However, as Jim Collins has noted, companies with charismatic leaders tend to falter after their departure. Here’s a quick overview of the pitfalls and the opportunities.
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We digital folks are a rebellious bunch. We don’t like being told what we can and can’t do. We like to think anything is possible and, sometimes, we even make good on our hubris.
With each passing year new products come to market that amaze us, not just through technological sophistication, but because they unlock desires and urges that we never knew we had. Alas, we often fail more than we succeed.
The most successful players fail the most. It’s a part of the price you pay when you set out to innovate. At places like Google, failure is almost a religion. Yet there is smart failure and stupid failure. Smart failure happens when you trek out into the unknown. Stupid failure happens when you ignore the rules. These four are the most important ones.
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We know intelligence when we see it. Witty repartee at a cocktail party. Outstanding results on standardized tests. Winning the big prize on a quiz show.
Defining it, however, is a bit harder. Ask anyone, even professional researchers who are supposed to know about such things (and therefore be very intelligent themselves) and you’ll get a very disparate set of views.
The question of intelligence is coming to the fore because we want to make our machines intelligent (presumably that would give us license to relax and be a bit dumber). It’s an incredibly hard problem. To solve it we will need to solve the intelligence problem. There has been some progress, but we’ve still got a long road ahead.
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Social marketing is hot. What once was vaguely referred to as “word of mouth” is now a huge business. Facebook is worth nearly $100 billion and social listening and community assignments have become lucrative sources of ad agency fees.
Strangely enough, social network analysis has largely been ignored. In an industry obsessed with metrics, that seems like quite an oversight.
Since the late ‘90’s the science of social networks has been an intense field of study. It has changed the way we combat terrorism, study ecologies, fight disease and even evaluate organizations, but has yet to carry over to ad agencies and marketing organizations. Here are three areas where insights from the scientific community can be directly applied.
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When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it was nothing less than the validation over one way of life over another. A decades old debate was ended, seemingly in an instant. We one, they lost. End of story.
Yet the story isn’t truly over. In fact, the debate lives on quietly and, beneath the surface, you can be sure it’s still there.
Communism wasn’t just a system, but also a set of institutions. It was propagated by a set of behaviors that made one successful in that system. We’d like to think that the end of the system meant an end to the behavior, but I’m not so sure. To see what I mean, let’s look at what you would have to do to be a successful communist executive.
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Global terrorism. Financial Crises. Digital technology. We are truly at the fulcrum of history. Comfortable old notions are no longer warm blankets, but shackles in an era that demands agile maneuvers.
It seems as if we have unleashed powers that are beyond us, that we have opened the genie’s bottle and maybe we shouldn’t have.
There’s some truth to that. However, what is often missed is that the forces that are driving our volatile world were let loose long ago. In fact, they were always there, but we were led to think they weren’t by notions of great men who, for all their brilliance, turned out to have been mistaken in some important ways. In the end, we’re better off for it.
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Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about content strategy in marketing circles. I must confess, I don’t really know what that is.
Possibly, that’s because I’ve spent a large portion of my career in publishing, shared a lot of time with other publishers, gone to conferences, the Stanford Publishing Course and never, in all that time, heard of such an animal.
Nevertheless, marketers seem to be quite excited by the idea. Content is becoming a hot area and so would seem to require a strategy. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I don’t know what a content strategy is. However, after being involved in dozens of successful media launches over my career I do know how to publish. Here’s how it’s done.
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Innovation seems magical. Like Steve Jobs in a black turtleneck showing off his new wonder or the simple fact that we carry devices in our pockets more powerful than the computers that put a man on the moon.
So it’s not surprising that the path to innovation is shrouded in mystery, something only to be undertaken by those dazzling intelligence, incredible daring and a certain flair.
However, in truth, there is an astonishing amount of agreement among experts on how to go about it. From scientists, to economists to entrepreneurs, the same themes repeat themselves with almost metronomic regularity. So while the endpoint of any innovative process is impossible to determine, the path to innovation is well paved.
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