Marketers tend to idealize consumers. We like to think of them as happy, good looking, ambitious and technologically forward. We feel that we need to keep up with them or get left behind.
But what if they are none of those things? What if they are even…angry and predisposed against the lifestyle that we like to portray in presentations.
While working in Turkey, I encountered just such a situation. As I dug deeper, I became convinced that it isn’t just a Turkish phenomenon, but a widespread reality that, to a greater or lesser extent, pertains to all markets and it is a reality we, for the most part, are ignoring.
If Google is so smart, why can’t they follow basic principles laid out in any MBA textbook?
Put simply, Google’s strategy tends to be stupid in much the same way I previously wrote about Apple’s stupid strategy. They don’t follow any of the normal rules that are taught in business schools or that grace the PowerPoint decks of management consultants.
Sure, Google makes a fantastic product, but I doubt many would say that they have a superior plan. In fact, throughout the history of the company they haven’t really seemed to make strategy, at least in the customary sense, a priority. Either they’re doing it wrong or there is something amiss with conventional ideas about strategic planning.
In the well intentioned pursuit of accountability and a more businesslike approach, the marketing industry has, to a large extent, lost its way. What was once a discipline that prided itself on its ideas, has become one that reveres numbers it doesn’t truly understand.
Like Wall Street, marketers have sought to raise their art to a science through quantification and have even borrowed jargon from their financial brethren. The result is pseudoscience in the guise of professionalism which obscures far more than it reveals.
To truly comprehend where marketing is going wrong and how to fix it, we need to go back to where finance faltered and forge a different path for marketing.
Some things we learn in school. Others, our parents tell us when we’re young. Still others (often, the most interesting) kids told us in the playground at school.
However, when we go out into the world, we find that we’re poorly equipped to deal with much that life throws at us. We fumble around, often fail and have to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off. That’s when we learn life’s most important lessons.
Hype, much like the proverbial soldier’s girlfriend, doesn’t exactly lie, but doesn’t tell the whole truth either. We’re told our whole world will change, lots of journalists and investment bankers drive expectations further and then we are inevitably disappointed. Only later, we find that, after all, there really was something to it all along.
Recently, someone introduced me to the Gartner Hype Cycle, which does a good job of not only describing the how hype plays out, but also tracks it and gives important insights on how to manage and profit from hyped technology.
Facebook valued at $50 billion? Twitter and LinkedIn to follow with their own multibillion dollar transactions? Huffington Post sold to AOL at $315 million? Does all this make any sense? Nobody can know for sure.
Lately, though, it seems that as soon as a deal is announced pundits rush to pan it. “The ‘dot bomb’ era all over again!,“ they cry. What’s startling is just how little substance is behind such claims. Most of them are, in fact, little more than ad hominem attacks and histrionics, with little or no analysis of financial logic.
The best thing you can say about any strategic move is that it was done for good reasons and that the numbers make sense. As I will explain below, that seems to be true of the deals happening now.
The events in Egypt have renewed the debate about social media and revolutions. As someone who has actually experienced a revolution myself, I have found much of it to be silly and more than a little annoying. There’s just something creepy about people sipping lattes and tweeting about how much good they’re doing.
Nevertheless, social media’s mere prominence in the story of the Egyptian protesters does suggest that there is something afoot. While revolutions existed long before Twitter, political movements are clearly social phenomena and therefore governed by the laws of social networks and accelerated by social media.
In light of what’s happened over the past few weeks, it seems like a good moment to reflect on the similarities of how technology and social networks played a part in the protests of both 2004 Kiev and 2011 Cairo.
What do you do with top performers who are nasty? Fire them, of course.
This was a conclusion I arrived at years ago and, after having put it into practice, I can attest that it works. It not only creates a better workplace, but it improves performance.
When I mentioned this principle in a previous post about the importance of employee development, I got a lot of feedback. Much was positive, but some was skeptical. So, I’m laying out my reasoning here for my “fire nasty people rule.” You can judge for yourself.
Soft power, noted Joseph Nye, is the power to get what you want without coercion. That’s a good kind of power to have, but hard to define. Nye argues that it is a combination of lots of things, like economic success, technological prowess, good governance, lack of corruption, etc.
In a similar fashion,”influence” has become a central topic of discussion in marketing circles. The opportunity to get messages across with less expenditure of resource and effort is enticing indeed. However, defining people’s influence (excluding, of course, celebrities) is problematic.
Nevertheless, measuring influence is certainly not impossible and there are several valid approaches. Here’s an overview:
Creativity is changing. Not so long ago, it seemed like a “man on the mountain” approach could suffice. All you needed was a great idea and then get people to rally around it to make it happen (or so many thought).
To whatever extent that was ever true, it certainly seems to be getting less so. Due partly to a change in zeitgeist and partly to greater integration and complexity in business life, we’re working more in teams. So the question is: What makes some teams better than others?
Research into social networks has begun to shed some light on that question and is coming up with some sensible answers that have important practical implications.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
