Voltaire once said, “If you would like to converse with me, define your terms.” He would have never made a career as a digital marketing guru.
However, if digital marketing is ever to mature into a serious enterprise, we need to return to Voltaire, because defining terms is the core digital problem. For any communication endeavor to succeed, there needs to be some consensus of what we’re talking about.
Digerati like to say, “Nobody gets it!” Gets what? That’s what we need to figure out.
Everybody should be excited about the next big thing. And why not? It’s very, extremely big. Even bigger than anything that came before. No, really, it’s that freakin’ HUGE.
If you don’t want to get left behind, you’ve got to hop on this right away. Of course, you will need to be fast and smart and work late nights, but it will be worth it. You can’t go halfway on a thing like this. It’s all or nothing, baby!
I’m here to tell you what this big thing is. But first, let’s take a quick look at past big things so that we can see why this one is so much bigger.
Michael Porter, the renowned strategic thinker, says that “Sound strategy starts with having the right goal.” However, what is becoming even more important is choosing the right kind of goal.
As technology, media and the marketplace evolve, the way we plan needs to adapt and change as well. This is truly one of the great challenges of modern marketing and it requires us to not only think differently than in the past, but also acquire the skills to meet new challenges and grasp emerging opportunities.
To gain perspective, let’s review how we got to this point and then look to what the future holds.
Many believe that a paradigm shift has taken place and we now inhabit a new digital media universe. They are mistaken and not just about media, but about paradigms as well.
Today, digital accounts for roughly 15% of global media expenditure. A little bit of grade school arithmetic will reveal that leaves 85% of budgets still dedicated to traditional media. Moreover, even if present trends continue, digital won’t reach the level of TV for at least a decade or two.
However, the real failure of digital media is how little it has affected how we use traditional media. For a true paradigm shift to take place, that’s what really has to change.
Do you need a digital strategy or digital skills?
Every business today is essentially a digital business. It’s hard to think of anything you can do without being affected by digital technology. This is especially true in the realm of media and marketing.
However, in seeking to compete in the digital arena, many companies make the mistake of focusing their efforts on strategy and neglect skills. The result is usually not only failure, but expensive failure.
Everybody wants to be smart. Intelligent people are admired by others for their ability to retain facts, complete crossword puzzles and maintain scintillating conversations at cocktail parties. Nobody wants to look dumb.
That’s unfortunate. There are a lot of benefits to being the dumbest guy in the room. You get to encounter ideas that you never heard of before. People can explain things to you that you don’t understand. Dumb people can always be surprised and thereby discover new things.
It isn’t easy, though. Being truly daft takes a whole lot of effort and courage. However, it can be accomplished. Read on and I’ll show you how.
There is no question more central to the practice of marketing than what makes people buy things. We have plenty of metrics and models, but confusion still prevails.
Most probably, a lot of the befuddlement is due to the fact that there is really no one true path to purchase. Different people at different times will interact with different brands and categories in a variety of ways. We might agonize over the choice of a candy bar and rush through the purchase of health insurance. There is no law that prevents us from doing whatever we want.
However, just because consumer decision making behavior is often complex and capricious is no reason to just throw up our hands in despair. There are effective and systematic ways of thinking about how people interact with brands and and metrics to help guide us.
When you drive past a car wreck, it’s human nature to stop, or at least slow down, and look.
That’s pretty much how I feel about the debate that’s broken out concerning Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in The New Yorker about how “The revolution will not be tweeted” and Twitter founder Biz Stone’s response in The Atlantic, lauding social media as a powerful force for good.
I’m very far away from the cocktail party chatter among the digerati of Manhattan and Berkeley, but I have experienced a revolution, up close and personal. Clearly, both men’s views miss fundamental realities about both revolutions and the part social media has to play in world events.
Last week, Benoit Mandelbrot died peacefully of pancreatic cancer at a hospice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 85 years old.
While it is not unusual or surprising for men of his advanced age to succumb to that kind of grave illness, his loss is nevertheless a profound one that is heartfelt by all who were familiar with his work and his special talent for delivering apparent heresies with a kind face, a soft voice and a childlike glint in his eye.
Yet he was much more than just a genial maverick, he fundamentally changed how we see the world (or at least how we should see the world). To remember him is not to dwell in the past, but to blaze boldly into the future that he helped build.
New ages require new rules. It should be obvious to even casual observers that there is a tectonic shift in marketing taking place and we all have to adapt to a rapidly changing context. What’s not so obvious is what that means. What do we actually have to do to bridge the divide?
Many say that adapting means that we have to abandon old rules and the substrates out of which they grew. In this view, we need to embrace Google, Twitter and Facebook and abandon the old ways of broadcast and print.
However, a more serious approach is to endeavor to understand the forces underlying the change. New paradigms arise when old frameworks prove inadequate to solve modern problems. Yet, for new paradigms to be successful, they need to apply to old ones as well.
