Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

A Back to the Future Journey in Marketing

At last! A new book that is thoroughly engaging as it tells us much of what we already know – or should know. This book is novel in that in order to experience greater marketing success in the future it turns our attention to our past. It is indeed, a back-to-the-future kind of book.  

Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran’s The Hyper-Social Organization takes us back to our roots – to times before recorded history when we became homo sapiens. It is a book about marketing in the age of so-called social media that reminds us of who we really are.

Like you probably are, I’m tired of the endless stream of books that claim to have new, breakthrough insights. Their authors typically have an idea that they think is unique but is more likely old wine in new bottles or at least not near as revolutionary as jacket copy makes out.  

While the marketing world at-large is going ga-ga over Web 2.0, Gossieaux and Ed Moran won’t let us forget that we are still Human 1.0. Technology may be vastly different from 10,000 years ago but human social organization and behavior is fundamentally as it was then. The authors remind us that our basic social needs have not changed in thousands of years.

They call to our attention the fact that despite all the friends you may have in your Facebook account and followers you have @Twitter, you are unlikely to maintain stable relationships with more than about 150 people. Guess what. On average, ancient farming villages and tribes were made up of about 150 people.

The jacket copy on The Hyper-Social Organization speaks of 5 steps to being hyper-social:

1.       Forget technology – understand the four drivers of successful communities.

2.       Forget market segments and consumers – think tribes and humans.

3.       Forget company centricity – think human centricity.

4.       Forget channels – think networks.

5.       Forget processes and hierarchies – think social messiness.

You can see from those 5 steps that Gossieaux and Ed Moran are dissing  a number of sacred cows in marketing. In doing so they present us with a refreshing view of the marketplace – not a new view, but a refreshing  view!

Gossieaux and Ed Moran remind us of how easy it is to get so swept up into technology that we forget the basics of what it has mean to be human in social terms for thousands of years. They do a good job of showing us how to use technology as a way of better meeting our ancient needs in the complex world of today.

 

 

 

 

The Alex Bogusky Story

What's going on? The biggest name in advertising has quit the game because conscience overcame ambition - http://tinyurl.com/34df8no

Welcome to the Age of Transcendence

I remember the criticism that was predictably levied against Bill Gates back in the early and mid-1990s for being tight-fisted with his wealth. He owed it to the world to give back, carped legions.

I also remember writing an essay calling for patience with Gates. He was only 40 years old in 1995 when Fortune named him the world’s richest person. I predicted that as Gates moved deeper into middle age he would become the most famous and liberally generous philanthropist in history. Philanthropy is not the game of young, aggressive entrepreneurs, I noted.

Now, Gates along with buddy Warren Buffet have raised the philanthropy bar for the über rich: pledge at least half of your wealth to worthy causes while alive or upon death. See the article in the current Fortune. 

The unprecedented generosity of Gates and Buffet, along with a growing number of insanely rich people, signals a major shift in human consciousness that I first spoke about in Firms of Endearment, a book of which I was co-author. I said we were on the cusp of a new era that I called the Age of Transcendence.

Life in the 20^th century was defined by materialism. Consumption became virtually a civic duty. Business invented planned product obsolescence and disposable goods to increase consumption. The political and commercial focus was on the individual. Especially after the sacrifices of World War II, life increasingly became all about Me. Politicians and marketers played to the acquisitive ego: big is better, more is best. Don’t just keep up with the Joneses. Leave them in the dust.

Life in the 21^st century already is shaping up to be vastly different from life in the 20^th century though we are just one decade into it. But a shift in human consciousness is already apparent. The materialistic consciousness of the 20^th century is yielding to an organic consciousness. Sustainability is replacing consumption as a primary civic duty. The singularity of Me is being replaced by the unitary We. Growing numbers of people define themselves by their experiences, not their possessions. We are indeed in the early years of an Age of Transcendence.

Consumers are also predictably projecting a stronger emphasis on quality. Why predictably? Twenty years ago I wrote my first book on older markets, Serving the Ageless market McGraw-Hill, 1990). In it I predicted that as the median age rose the influence of materialistic values would decline while the market for quality would expand. See this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek.  

The change in human consciousness taking place that adds up to the emergence of the Age of Transcendence is unprecedented in both scale and speed of evolution. Yet, while researchers are beginning to correctly identify aspects of its emergence and a growing number of books are describing its properties, hardly anyone has noticed that what’s happening is not a cyclical event. It represents a new step forward in human evolution.

So, what books are examples of some observers getting pieces of this new picture? Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind and his most recently released Drive. Also, a wave of books flowing from behavioral economics is capturing elements of the new consciousness. Daniel Airley’s Predictably Irrational was one of the first. James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink fall into this category as well. So also is Joshua Lehrer’s How We Decide and Joseph Hallanan’s Why We Make Mistakes.  

Anyone who job or business depends on understanding the mind of the market and who are unaware of the books I’ve mention as only a sampling of literature evidencing a seismic shift in human consciousness is a bit behind the times, as they say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where Will You Be in Five Years?

I suggest to readers of my new book in progress Brave New Worldview that they,” think about how you would have responded in 1990 if someone told you that in just 20 years amateur websites would have put many newspapers out of business; cells phones would have far more bandwidth than your 1990 PC; that we'd be watching 60" flat screen TVs light enough for one person to carry; that 25 billion pages of information could be searched in less than a quarter of a second; and that getting lost would be a thing of the past thanks to your cell phone’s connection to a completely free network of  global navigation satellites.”

I was making the point that the scale and pace of change is getting beyond our ability to predict it. To appreciate that point from a media and marketing perspective and over an even shorter time horizon, think about these several items: how many people in 2000 had heard of Google, which was incorporated out of a garage in Pala Alto just 18 months earlier?  Facebook, now the most accessed site on the planet did not exist until 2004, the year of Googol’s IPO. YouTube was still a year from going online; movies and television 2000 on cell phones were just around the corner.

Had much of what is in our lives today, which we’re already taking for granted, been predicted to be here in fewer than 10 years, many would have said, “You’re talking about the future, buddy.” Well, the future has arrived. It’s here now, at your doorstep.

My question is, “Are you ready for new developments in media and marketing that will take place over the next 10 years – or less? “

If you’re in some aspect of media and marketing and do not have at least one competent person in your department (or small company) thinking about the future between now and the next five years you could already be headed for trouble.

These thoughts were inspired by an article in the current Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek, “Twitter, Twitter, Little Stars.” It is a good indicator of where marketing is going in its fickle relationships with media. Will the CMO (whose average time in office is now less than two years) be replaced by a Chief Social Networks Officer?

It’s anyone’s guess as to what media and marketing will look like fire years from now as well as the jobs within the.The only way to play it safe is to save enough time and attention out of your day to look toward the horizon and try to see what’s coming over it even if you don’t know what it is at first or how it will affect you and your organization. Perhaps a monthly – or better, a bimonthly staff meeting over the treat of a catered lunch would give you the opportunity of tapping the wisdom of the crowd in your department or small organization to get a better idea of the future that is now fast approaching your doorstep.

Don't let the future run over you. Help invent it!

See Business Week's article about how the CSNO may be replacing the CMO: http://tinyurl.com/24erbfp

The Death of Branding Has Been Exaggerated (Part 4 of a Series)

Avoiding conflict between online and offline expression of the brand

An exercise I sometimes put before people in a marketing meeting is asking each person to write down the personality type that best describes the brand we are meeting about. It certainly is not an original exercise, but it never loses its value. If there are eight people in the meeting a good likelihood exists that no more than two or three will see the brand the same way.

Consistency has always been an issue in marketing. It can arise when the agency of record makes a significant team change. Consistency commonly becomes an issue when a client changes agencies. And consistency is an inevitable challenge when a company retains multiple agencies on a specialty basis such as having one for offline marketing and another for online marketing.

A brand can be compromised by inconsistencies in a number of ways. Style differences in communications are one way. This applies to both visual and semantic style differences. Major brands typically devote considerable effort to achieve consistency in visual styles. Typically a brand style book describes how a logo is to be reproduced and used or not used. The style book also carries specifications for colors and fonts to be used in communications.

One thing rarely addressed in style books is a brand’s semiotic profile. Semiotics is the study of symbols and symbol systems. A logo is the semiotic heart of a brand, but a strong brand depends on a well-managed system of symbols.

Take McDonald’s.  It is one of the best managed brands on the planet. First, it knows who it is and generally acts with well-disciplined consistency to express itself. Like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s is an example of the archetypal Innocent. Its golden arches are its primary logo, but its iconic clown Ronald McDonald plays a crucial role in defining the brand as the Innocent.

Were McDonald’s to create a new character to represent a different archetype, say one that conformed to the archetypal Joker such as Burger King’s silly King mask does – it could harm the brand. Seeing an old friend sporting a new personality is unnerving. This is the most important reason for establishing and maintaining a brand style book.

It takes a long time to position a brand in the mind of the market, but a single ill-conceived campaign can destroy years of investment in brand equity-building. New Coke is a classic example of an ill-conceived campaign that Coke was fortunate to survive, but Oldsmobile never survived the infamous ”This isn’t your father’s Oldsmobile.” Clearly, the creative director on that campaign  did not understand how people cognitively and emotionally process brands.

A brand’s semiotic profile should be described in detail in the brand style book.  The discussion should be supported by research. Inevitably, a new agency, a new creative director or a new CMO will appear on the scene with his or her ideas about how to make the brand really sing to the market and end up off key.

Importantly, semiotics is not just about visual symbols. It extends into a brand’s narrative. The Hallmark brand understands this. The brand’s lexical executions are tightly managed to reflect the Lover archetype it represents.

A brand’s narrative is a crucial factor in how consumers process a brand. The narrative voice must be consistent with the brand’s archetypal personality. When Coke tried a slapstick comedic approach several years ago, like Pepsi does very well, it bombed. Innocents don’t do slapstick.

I want to close this post with a question to companies that have a brand to develop and protect: Do you have a brand style book? If the answer is “No” I suggest that developing one should be top priority in these times when consumers rely more than ever on brands they deem trustworthy.

These are challenging times for brands. On one hand every product recall, every news article about corporate ethics and every aggravating customer experience makes consumers more skeptical and less trusting of brands and companies behind brands. On the other hand, once they feel they can trust a brand they breathe a sigh of relief and get on with their lives. But inconsistency in brand messaging is a major challenge not to be underestimated.

The Death of Branding Has Been Exaggerated (Part 3 of a Series)

On conflicts between online and offline brand management

Many companies today have two primary communications agencies. One handles marketing in the real world and is often designated as the agency of record. The other has lead responsibility in the virtual world of the Internet.

Some companies go with a single agency that purports to have superior capabilities in both worlds. But can a company deliver to a client with equal competence in both worlds?

I’m reminded of someone who once told me that buildings designed by architects sometimes fall down while buildings designed by engineers are ugly. His point was that the culture of an organization almost inevitably  projects the values of the founding discipline.

Certainly, over the years I have seen important qualitative differences between integrative agencies and direct response agencies. Integrative agencies tend to have a broader range of expression than direct response agencies. In fact the term “direct response” implies expression limited by qualitative analysis of marketplace response.

I expect that important strategic differences tend to exist between online and offline department within traditional agencies, and certainly  between independent offline and online agencies. 

One area in which differences may have critical consequences is in brand husbandry – managing the meaning of marketing messages so that the customer seamlessly experiences the brand as she moves back and forth through the invisible membrane dividing the online and offline worlds.

I say invisible membrane because in the deeper levels of the  brain, we do not sharply demark a property line between the 3-D world we live in and the world of 0’s and 1’s we now spend a goodly portion of our time in. This is brilliantly illustrated in a 7-year old book whose perspective is as fresh today as it was when I first read it. It’s called The Media Equation by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass. Anyone involved in online marketing is missing out on some pretty big ideas if they have not read this amazingly insightful book.

Back to the brand question – what Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson insightfully call “meaning management.”

Meaning management or brand husbandry is generally a more intimate and more dynamic activity online than it is offline in any other setting  except in face-to-face selling.  Understanding this begins with Reeves and Nass’s research which shows that viscerally  interact with broadcast and online media using many of the same social rules they use in human-to-human exchanges.

For example, Reeves and Nass assembled a group of self-styled tech nerds who denied thinking of their computers as human. “Just tools, they said. They then were each positioned in front of a computer to carry out a learning exercise. Midway through the exercise the computer queried the nerds about how clear its instruction were. They  “No problem” they in essence responded. In the second half of the experiment, midway through another learning exercise, the subjects were instructed to take up a position in front of another computer. Then the second computer asked them how well the first computer was doing in getting its instructions across. “Not so well” the essence of the second round of responses.

Think of how you would likely respond to someone how asked you, “How am I doing in getting my instructions across to you?”  Most of us would be inclined to give a response similar to the one given by the nerds to the first computer, but just as likely to tell another person who asked how clear the instructions were that they could stand some improvement.

The bilateral communications possible on the Internet have complicated the management of a brand’s meaning. From the marketer’s side of the “media equation” it’s not hard to get off track and frustrate those on the consumer side. Just recall, for example, how often you get a voice recognition avatar when you call a bank or airline or whatever and get angry because the damned thing is not paying attention to what you’re saying. Score meaning management 0

. Such episodes erode customer loyalty. People simply don’t like being in relationships in which other parties don’t appear to be listening to you. While a print ad or television commercial is generating  positive feelings about a brand the customers’ online experience can erode all the good will created by the print and broadcast messaging.

NEXT IN THIS SERIES: Avoiding conflict between online and offline expression of the brand.

 

 

 

 

How We Decide

I recently highlighted a new book about the brain: The Master and His Emissary by British neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. Having read dozens of books about the brain over the years, I’m comfortable saying in my claim that this is one of the most important books ever written about the brain for general audiences.

But now comes another book about the brain:  How We Decide, by science writer Jonah Lehrer whose writing is highly accessible. We’re on the cusp of major changes in how we view the human brain and mind. This book does as better job than any I know about in introducing some of these changes to lay readers.   

The revealing lights of contemporary brain science have shown that our traditional views of what goes on between our ears is grossly out of whack with reality. New insights into the workings of the mind will influence every major field in which human behavior is a telling factor. From my perspective as a marketer, I foresee huge changes in how we shape our messages.

For instance, marketers need to learn more about how to get the attention of the right hemisphere of the brain. That is where most customer decisions originate and are concluded.

But how do you talk to the right brain?  The left side of the brain is the language side. The right brain has only primitive language abilities. A message that tells customers about the superior virtues of a product generally gets a yawn from the right brain. The right brain is deaf and blind to rational entreaties.

A message has to produce an emotional response to get the right brain’s attention. And because the right brain serves as a gateway to the left brain, no emotional response to a message by the right brain likely means no rational attention by the left brain.

The idea of so-called neuromarketing is getting a lot of attention these days. The term generally refers to consumer research using brain scanning tools. Researchers watch a consumer’s brain while she reacts to a word, image or other marketing-related stimulus. However, not many marketing firms can afford a $3 million fMRI scanner. So, the next best thing – no, the far better thing is for people involved in creating and approving marketing messages to learn something about how brains and minds work. In fact, save time and don’t pay any attention to reports of what great things await us in marketing as fMRI scanning technology gets better. As Jonah Lehrer wrote recently in his blog The Frontal Cortex

Functional MRI has been used to study all sorts of sexy psychological properties. You've probably seen the headlines: "Scientists Discover Love in the Brain!" and "This Is Your Brain on God!" Such claims are often accompanied by a pretty silhouette of a skull, highlighted with splotches of primary color. It's like staring at a portrait of the soul. It's also false. In reality, huge swaths of the cortex are involved in every aspect of cognition. The mind is a knot of interconnections, so interpreting the scan depends on leaving lots of stuff out, sifting through noise for the signal. We make sense of the data by deleting what we don't understand.

What's disappointing here isn't just that these early fMRI studies are overhyped or miss important facts. It's that this mistake is all too familiar. Time and time again, an experimental gadget gets introduced -- it doesn't matter if it's a supercollider or a gene chip or an fMRI machine -- and we're told it will allow us to glimpse the underlying logic of everything. But the tool always disappoints, doesn't it? We soon realize that those pretty pictures are incomplete and that we can't reduce our complex subject to a few colorful spots. So here's a pitch: Scientists should learn to expect this cycle -- to anticipate that the universe is always more networked and complicated than reductionist approaches can reveal.

So, buy a copy of How We Decide to take to the beach or off into the mountains with you on your summer vacation. But if you choose not to learn more about how the customer’s brain and mind work, maybe it’s time to consider changing your career. The only problem is I have a hard time thinking of a career that will not be changed by new insights into the workings of the intelligent mass of tissue between our ears.

 

Motivation: The subject of Daniel Pink's Latest

If you would like to get a great synopsis of Daniel Pink's new best seller about workplace motivations go to this mind map-illustrated 11-minute presentation by Pink. His book is called Drive:The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

The Middle-Aged Brain Is a Better Brain

Interesting material on the middle-aged brain from the new book, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain, by Barbara Strauch, the health and medical science editor for The New York Times: