Modern marketing really began in the 1960’s with Philip Kotler and his ideas about uncovering the “needs, wants and interests of target markets.” Ever since, generations of marketers have learned to focus on the consumer and communicating features and benefits to them effectively.
Yet perhaps an even more important source of wisdom for marketers today is Ronald Coase’s famous 1937 paper about The Nature of the Firm, which argued that the purpose of a firm is to minimize transaction costs, especially search and information costs. Surely, that is also an important function of brands.
Today, digital technology has brought search and information costs crashing down. So the challenge is no longer getting a message in front of consumers, but that they are so deluged with information that they are often completely overwhelmed. That’s why marketers need to worry less about collecting “eyeballs” and learn to design rich and seamless interfaces.
When J. Paul Getty was asked about his formula for success he said, “rise early, work hard, strike oil.” The quote is funny because it’s meant to be. Every story of great success involves some luck, yet few admit it as readily as Getty did and that kind of honesty is refreshing.
These days, there is no shortage of advice on how to be successful. Learning to code, creating disruption and even Montessori schools are commonly cited examples. But they are no more helpful than, “learn to do heart surgery”, “come up with a great idea and “go to Harvard.”
Yet take a deeper look at any story of great success and you will find one thing that they all have in common: overcoming failure and adversity. There is no straight shoot to the top. There will be challenges along the way and some will get the better of you. What makes top performers different is that they take adversity and use to help them shape a better future.
In an unusually contentious political season, there seems to be one thing that unites leaders from both parties: the need to thwart terrorists using encrypted messages. Everybody from President Obama and Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump and Jeb Bush are calling on the private sector to facilitate backdoors for security officials.
The tech industry, for its part, has balked. A letter to President Obama, signed by dozens of top firms as well as civil liberties organizations and security experts, urged him to “reject any proposal that U.S. companies deliberately weaken the security of their products,” saying that it would “undermine our economic security.”
The truth is that such a policy would provide little benefit at great cost. While it would impair the marketability of American products, perhaps permanently, criminals and terrorists could simply use encryption protocols beyond the reach of the US government. At the same time, the general public would face increased vulnerability to hackers looking to steal our data.
All too often, we see innovation as a single event. A genius like Steve Jobs envisions a thousand songs in our pocket and the iPod is born! Or Alexander Fleming notices a mold growing in a petri dish and suddenly penicillin transforms medical science.
Yet the truth is that the road to any significant innovation is a long and twisted path. First, scientific research uncovers important insights. Then, those discoveries must be engineered into useful solutions and finally, new products and processes must be implemented at scale in order to transform a particular field or industry.
Unfortunately, most efforts focus on only one part of the chain. Researchers toil away quietly in their labs, engineers tinker with improvements and evangelists work to accelerate adoption. Yet at MD Anderson they’re working on a new, more integrated model they hope will revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry. Early signs suggest that it’s working.
Content, in theory, should be a boon to marketers. The Content Marketing Institute says that “consumers have shut off the traditional world of marketing“ and touts content as a “strategic marketing approach that can attract and retain audiences” and “drive profitable customer action.”
Sounds great. The only problem, as I’ve noted before, is that content is crap. Nobody calls anything good, like an Oscar winning film or a hit song, content. The concept mostly exists as a fantasy in the minds of strategic planners who want to replace paid media with long-form ads on media assets they own and control.
In other words, content marketing fails largely because it is pursued by marketers who bring a traditional mindset to a completely new field. Rather than discovering and telling stories, they try to wrap marketing messages inside canned narratives. The truth is that marketers need to shift their mental models to think less like carnival barkers and more like publishers.
Yet this year I can’t think of anything truly new that is having a major impact. Yes, there is a sharing economy that’s emerging, robots are taking our jobs and we seem to be in the middle of a new industrial revolution, but those things have been going on for some time. They are, essentially, the continuation of previous trends.
Still, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t big things underway. In fact, we’re on the cusp of some transformational changes. We are entering a new era in the fight against cancer, closing in on a major breakthrough in energy storage and open sourcing artificial intelligence. Those aren’t your typical hot trends, but represent new paradigms of enormous significance.
The past few years have been especially good for books. It seemed like every time you turned around, some great CEO or brilliant scientist was publishing a memoir. Or somebody else you’d never heard of just comes out with something incredibly insightful and interesting that you just had to read. It was hard to keep up!
This past year wasn’t nearly as well stocked, but there were some truly excellent titles to choose from. What’s more, the somewhat slower pace gave me a chance to go back and read some great stuff I missed from previous years. So, all in all, I had no problem getting my fix.
As in past years, this list reflects the books I’ve read and written about on Digital Tonto. While this year’s list may not be as current as previous ones, there’s no shortage of great insights to be gleaned from some really smart people. I hope you find a few that you like and enjoy them as much as I did. Have a great holiday!
Thirty years ago, when Marty McFly arrived in 2015, there were hover-boards, robotic gas stations and a Mr. Fusion machine that could power everything (yet strangely, still pay phones and newspapers). Instead, we got global terrorism and Donald Trump as a viable Presidential candidate.
Not all of the news is bad though. We’re on the brink of curing cancer, sent a spaceship to Pluto and got a global climate deal. Mostly, 2015 has been a strange year. Europe moved right while Canada moved left. We lost Letterman and Jon Stewart, but elevated Stephen Colbert to new heights. It’s hard to know whether to cheer or cry.
Through it all, one constant has been Digital Tonto, delivering two articles a week and a newsletter on Sunday. We’ve come a long way, geographically and otherwise, since I launched the site in my apartment in Kyiv six years ago. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support! Here are my top posts of 2015.
In 1985, a relatively unknown professor at Harvard Business School named Michael Porter published a book called Competitive Advantage, which explained that by optimizing every facet of the value chain, a firm could consistently outperform its competitors. The book was an immediate success and made Porter a management superstar.
In truth, neither view fully represents today’s business environment. Certainly, companies like Apple and Southwest are still able to dominate their industries, but the source of advantage has changed. We no longer compete in a resource economy, but a semantic economy where firms that can build, manage and widen connections win out.
Corporate leaders love to talk about values. They put them on web sites, frame them, place them prominently in boardrooms and proudly espouse them in media interviews. The notion of values has become so pervasive that it’s hard to find any CEO who doesn’t tout their importance.
Yet all too often, values are little more than window dressing. Key stakeholders, including employees, customers and partners are either completely unaware what the stated values are or don’t believe that they ring true. In some cases, corporate talk about values amounts to no more than a cruel joke.
I doesn’t start out that way. It’s hard to imagine even the most jaded executive team affirming values they don’t believe in. Rather, the problem is usually that values are easy to write down, but hard to live up to. So what begins with a sincere effort ends with a lofty checklist of anodyne virtues that don’t reflect reality. Here’s how to create values that stick:
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.
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