Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

Why Isn't Building Shareholder Wealth a Valid Corporate Purpose?

You better watch out,
You better not cry,
Better not pout,
I'm telling you why:
Santa Claus is coming to town.
He's making a list,
And checking it twice;
Gonna find out
Who's naughty and nice.
Santa Claus is coming to town.

It’s that time of year, when at least when I was a kid you best minded your p’s and q’s lest the red-capped visitor soon to arrive from the North Pole leave you a lump of coal instead of a shiny new toy.

A lot of business writers are going about warning companies to mind their social responsibilities if they want to avoid being paid in lumps of coal. As co-author of Firms of Endearment, a recent bestseller dealing with the issue of corporate morality, I want to tell you why much of what people who promote the doctrine of corporate social responsibility is misdirected.

Let’s start with the first two sentences of Firms of Endearment:

This book is not about corporate social responsibility. It is about sound management.

We started the book with those two sentences because we believed that a moral platform is generally not a strong strategic platform for building and growing a company.  

Nobel economist Milton Friedman said – infamously so in many people’s minds – that the only social responsibility of a business is building shareholder wealth. While I have criticized Friedman for too narrow a view of corporate social responsibility, at its core his declaration of a company’s social purpose is sound.

The term “purpose” has become a big IN word in discussions about what companies should do for society. It appears explicitly in numerous book titles and a steady stream of articles about what companies need to do to justify their existences. The subtext is that companies with a purpose are superior from a social perspective to companies that only work to create profits for their owners.

My question is, “Why is building shareholder wealth not a valid purpose?” Whether it is done nobly or not is another issue.

The central theme of Firms of Endearment is about achieving business success (call it shareholder wealth building, if you like) by aligning company needs with those of five core stakeholder groups. Notice that I use the term “aligning”, not “balance.”

Times are when investors’ interests take precedence and other times when employees’ or customers’ needs come first.  The issue is not who ranks first among stakeholders but does a company operate in a fashion in which no stakeholder gains at the uncompensated expense of other stakeholders.

Firms of Endearment was the first book written for general business audiences about formally making the needs of multiple stakeholder groups a strategic platform for business development and operations. It is a book about sound management, not about what various people might regard as a company’s moral obligations to society.

Companies that base their operations on a multiple stakeholder business model are liberally found throughout “Best Companies to Work for” lists. They enjoy uncommonly low customer turnover and are widely applauded for the positive contributions they make to the communities in which they operate. But none of that means that these companies are driven by abstract moral objectives. Survivability and profitability are their first order of business, as well it should be on behalf of a company’s investors.  

But what best serves investors is often wrapped up with what best serves all core stakeholders.

 Companies that subscribe to the multiple stakeholder business model tend to experience lower employee turnover, higher productivity, deeper customer loyalty, better relationships with suppliers, stronger community support and lower marketing costs. All that being the case, why wouldn’t a company want to make the multiple stakeholder business model the strategic foundation of its operations?

The answer to that question must be reserved for another post, for it is indeed puzzling why such a sure-fire way of building a company is not more broadly followed. However, I was motivated to write this post after reading yet one more article about how company operations should be rooted in “purpose” with the implication that making a profit for shareholders is not a worthy “purpose.”

That theme has grown tiresome for me.

Besides, what one person may consider a worthy purpose might well be considered by another person as an unworthy purpose.

So, it’s time to begin stop thinking about corporate social responsibility as a moral imperative. Instead, as companies like Costco, Starbucks, Whole Foods, Patagonia and others we researched for Firms of Endearment have found, thinking outside the traditional the investor box can be a great way to build shareholder wealth. And to serve the interests of members of all core stakeholder groups.

The bottom line here is that management best serves shareholders when its actions are aligned with the interests of all stakeholders. There is no need to think about corproate social responsibilty as a separate matter. It's about what makes for sound management that best serves owners' interests. The multiple stakeholder business model does just that.

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 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.

 

 

 

 

Engagement Clusters: Where Conversations with Customers Begin: Part3

As pointed out in the previous post on this topic, “cluster husbandry is not about targeting consumers. It’s about encouraging them to become meaningfully engaged by interacting with them in an authentic voice.” The social foundation of a cluster in this sense is conversational reciprocity – two-way communications between participants in the cluster.  This is a key tool in fostering meaningful online engagement.

It is important to take into account that “two-way” communications is not limited to verbal communications. A person’s mere presence in a cluster communicates something if only curiosity about the cluster, who is it and why. From a marketer’s perspective cluster metrics can have enormously information value.  They can put the market analyst in the position of being  “a fly in the corner,” observing what other cluster participants are saying about a brand, their needs, the quality of their lives, their pains, but also their dreams, hopes and plans for the future.

The frequency with which a topic is discussed by participants in a cluster can also have great value to the analyst. It can be a measure of the intensity of a need and the percentage of cluster participants experiencing the need.

Advocates of cluster husbandry regard it as one of the most significant developments in Web 2.0 – a term widely used to reflect the transition of consumers from passive recipients of market information exchanges to active co-creators of market information. To an analyst skilled in gathering, analyzing and interpreting cluster metrics virtually no other form of exchanging information with consumers provides a more empathetic view of customers.  

Cluster husbandry takes its cues from customers’ values, circumstances needs and emotions, particularly as they are revealed in social networking venues. As such, cluster husbandry is strongly grounded in empathy: the act of identifying with and understanding another person’s values, circumstances, needs, and emotions.  

Engagement clusters are economic ecosystems within larger economic ecosystem that include industries, government entities and society at-large. Engagement clusters, like other economic ecosystems, are organized around the information needs and exchanges between their participants. This is the essence of the multiple stakeholder relationship (MSR) business model that will be the subject of an upcoming post in this series.)

The market analyst in cluster husbandry is not a passive recipient of information generated by consumer participants in a cluster. But the proactive focus different from what focused marketers’ attentions in the past when they were more concerned with “sales funnels” and the direct conversion of consumers’ attention into sales.

In marketing based on cluster husbandry, the marketer automatically shifts greater attention to “referral funnels” by empathetically connecting with consumers’ need. This requires a different way of thinking about marketing.  As the term “husbandry” suggests, it means growing, nurturing and feeding clusters with information relevant to the topics and needs generated by cluster populations.

Through feedback from r members of clusters comprising the total marketing realm of a company’s economic ecosystem, the marketer comes to understand how his or her messaging resonates throughout the various clusters and why.  This provides a knowledge-based foundation for refining or changing messaging and media buys to reflect the messages that emerged in the ecosystem and thereby increase conversion of interest to sales and extend advertising reach. 

Immersion Active recently designed and carried out a campaign that illustrates significant increases in marketing effectiveness that can be achieved from a consumer-centered cluster husbandry approach to marketing. 

Home Instead Senior Care wanted to connect with the adult children of older parents.  Immersion Active responded by first identifying a variety of channels adult children were using to communicate with others. By monitoring these channels, the market analysts was able to identify topics, needs and values that would be helpful in creating messages from Home Instead Senior Care that were relevant to potential customers.

Immersion Active inferred from its analysis of these channels that features-based advertising would likely have a weak conversion rate from attention to sales. In fact, it believed that the ability of such advertising to get prospects’ attention would be poor.

So, instead of a features-based approach, Immersion Active used a story-telling approach in emails and other online messaging.  The impact was unambiguously positive: A 400% percent conversion lift and a five-fold increase in service inquiries year over year. 

Additionally, Home Instead Senior Care experienced a more than doubling of the amount of sharing of content on its domain through the use of helpful, conversational resources. It found that that people who shared materials were over five times more likely to inquire about services as those who did not share.  That provides strong support for the importance placed on achieving meaningful online engagement that was discussed earlier and the vital importance of conversational reciprocity.

Special Thanks to Joe Ford, Director of Analytics and Optimization, Immersion Active, for help in developing this series.

Engagement Clusters: Where Conversations with Customers Begin: Part 2

My previous post introduced a Web 2.0 era  definition of “cluster,” a term traditionally associated in marketing with demographic segments. This post continues the discussion with an examination of the art and science of cluster husbandry.

 Cluster husbandry is not about targeting consumers. It’s about encouraging them to become meaningfully engaged by interacting with them in an authentic voice. As the agricultural term “husbandry” implies, cluster husbandry turns marketing efforts into a farming-like practice. It’s about generating and tending to a community of supporters of a brand. 

Cluster husbandry is genuinely consumer centric: it starts with a more holistic view of consumers’ needs than characteristic of traditional marketing. In the past, marketers have tightly focused on bending consumers’ wills to their wills. In cluster husbandry, the marketer strives to wed his or her will to that of consumers. Cluster husbandry is an authentic expression of relationship marketing.

Despite thousands of articles, entire seminars and many books on the subject over the past two decades, relationship marketing has generally not been about caring relationships with consumers; rather, it has been about finding more effective ways of targeting consumers and “reeling them in.” For example, so-called customer relationship management (CRM) is not about managing customer relationships. It is about managing customer data. Better that it be called customer data management.

CRM is a quantitative approach to markets. Cluster husbandry is a qualitative approach. It includes quantitative tasks but “numbers” don’t dominate the process.  Numbers are important in setting objectives and feedback metrics that help the cluster specialist determine how well objectives are being met. They are especially important in gauging consumer satisfaction with their participation in a cluster social network.

One way to view clusters is as ecosystems in which people, places and things are organized around exchanges of information concerning topics and needs of the people involved, be they consumers or providers. David Weigelt and Jonathan Boehman, the principles in Immersion Active and sponsors of this blog brought forth this idea in their book Dot Boom. In another time they might have used the term cluster management.”  However, that would imply ambitions of control that are more suitable to the posture of traditional marketing. Cluster husbandry is not about gaining and exercising control over consumers. It’s about collaborating with them in determining their needs and finding effective means of satisfying those needs.

 Cluster husbandry is like traditional marketing with respect to one overarching objective: finding ways to break through the clutter of advertising.   However, the cluster manager will likely discover more ways to do this than the traditional marketer will because the cluster manager works both sides of the equation: first, from the consumer side, then from the provider side. The magic lies in seamlessly integrating the both sides in the information  exchange process.

To the cluster manager, the consumer is not a number in a data set. The consumer, as David Ogilvy famously said, “is your wife.”  Obviously he meant that metaphorically. He wanted to bring home the flesh and blood reality the consumer represents by positioning her in personal terms. Ogilvy, one of the greatest marketing minds of all time by common  accord, understood relationship marketing before it became a buzz word in marketing and long before everyone had a personal computer on their desk to focus the marketer’s mind on number instead of on consumers’ circumstances, needs and emotions.

Ogilvy understood consumers as people as few marketers since his time have. Getting such an understanding is the best place to start in setting up your first cluster husbandry ecosystem. That is where I will pick up in my next post.

 

How the Subjective Voice in Market Messaging Differs from the Objective Voice

 

“I’m being logical, damn it!” shouted the CFO in a client company as he slammed his fist on the conference room table. This man of numbers never brought emotions into his decision-making, or so he would have me believe.  

Ever since French philosopher Rene Descartes postulated the foundations of modern scientific methodology, emotions have been viewed as a kind of cerebral funhouse mirror that distorts truth.  

The irony of that view is that logic can outdo emotions when it comes to producing distorted pictures of reality. In fact, emotions tend to be better in capturing the essence of reality. Consider, for example, intuition. It is an insight derived from emotion, not rationale processes.     How would you define emotions? The correct answer makes it clearer why emotions can more faithfully represent reality minds than analysis and reason often does.

Simply defined, emotions are changes in body states. They are comprised of electrochemical responses to a matter that generate changes in heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, adrenalin flow and among other body states. As such, emotions are analogs of reality. Like the a fuel gauge’s needle, emotions move in direct proportion to that which activates their movement..

So how is it that people often distort reality when they are upset? Because they view a matter through a cognitive lens that distorts reality. Any representation of truth can be justified through impeccably drawn analysis and reasoning that nevertheless distorts reality. This accounts for difference between people in a wide spectrum of beliefs ranging from politics and culture to science and religion.

Another factor in distortion of reality is the role played by feelings. Contrary to custom, feelings and emotions are not synonymous. Emotions are changes in body states. Feelings represent our interpretation of why body states have changed. Those interpretations turn out to be distortions of reality.

Emotions originate in two places in the brain. The primary source is an organ in the midbrain called the amygdala. This where instinctual emotions, sometime jokingly referred to as the Four Fs arise:  fighting, fleeing, feeding and reproducing.  The second source is the right prefrontal cortex, which gives rise to cognitive emotions. Road rage arises in the amygdala. The ability to control it arises in the prefrontal cortex.

Cognitive emotions turn us from cavemen into civilized human beings. They are the mental tool that gave us to keep raw nature in our behavior in check. So the next time someone blasts you with their horn while giving you the finger, you may want to yell out at them , “Caveman!” Of course if you do that you are behaving like a caveman (or cavewoman). With that bit of neuroanatomy we can now address the issue raised the previous post, the subjective voice in market messaging versus the objective voice.

The subjective voice is rooted in emotions and reflects a right brain bias. It is a voice that gives expression to emotions, instinctual behavior, intuition and it revels on discovery. It conveys a keen sense of the whole picture, the forest if you will, and parses reality more in terms of relationships than categories.

The left brain-biased objective voice gives expression to rationality, analysis, logic and a sense of caution. It projects reality more in terms of categories than relationships. The objective voice expresses its view of reality in linear fashion with a greater focus on details than on the whole picture. The accompanying chart summarizes the definitive properties of subjective and objective voices. Keep in mind that no one operates exclusively in one voice or another. In fact, because the right brain is kind of gate keeper to the left brain, to reach even the most rational, logic-driven, left brain mind requires passage through the right brain. The right brain is the issuer of landing rights to the left brain, without which the marketer cannot get a message into the mills of left brain processing.

The young adult brain finds safety in anchoring its worldviews to the detailed, linear, analytic approach to parsing reality that reflects the objective voice. Successful social integration depends on a person’s ability to integrate with a group’s consensus on core issues that define it. The young person must learn and adapt to a group’s social codes, whether a group be for professional or private membership. This is the neuropsychological source of a phenomenon that marketers love: the herd mentality that prominently marks young people’s social behavior.  

It is far easier to divine the group mind underlying her behavior than to do so for individual minds on a mass basis. This presents marketers a critical challenge in middle age and older markets because the herd mentality has usually lost most of its influence by the time people are well into midlife. Further complicating matters, developmental changes in the brain incline a person toward less black-and-white certainty about life than he or she experienced as a young adult. A plethora of disappointments, personal hurts, and abandoned dreams has conditioned the older adult to accept reality as a game of chance. This increases a person’s skepticism about when others purport to have the best answers. It also increases the older person’s confidence in his or her take on matters. The become “more resist to enculturation,” in the words of Abraham Maslow.

To conclude, then, a very big reason that marketing appears by many measures to be less effective now than in the pre-Internet, less media-saturated past has less to do with the Internet and an over-abundance of media than commonly claimed. The mind of the market has changed dramatically toward a more subjective foundation, yet marketers are still overwhelmingly speaking with an objective voice.

Say It Ain't So, Dove

I am stunned. I feel cheated. I am mad. Damn mad!

For several years I have been touting Dove’s Real Beauty campaign as a high-minded example of authenticity in consumer marketing. Imagine my dismay, then, when I discovered in the May 12 issue of The New Yorker that the real beauties in Dove’s Real Beauty campaign are not real.

The success of the Real Beauty campaign still validates my original points:

• Being honest in today’s markets can pay off big
• The zeitgeist has shifted from an emphasis on idealization to an emphasis on reality

No need existed for Dove to hire the world’s reputed best pixalist, Pascal Dangin, to digitally turn “ordinary” women into – well – ordinary women. There is no lack of doughy-fleshed women.

Remember Jamie Lee Curtis’s famous full-page pose in the September 2002 issue of More? She agreed to be that issue’s cover story subject if More would show her as she is in a sports halter and shorts shot – billowing love handles and all, with no makeup, no special photographer’s lighting and no air brushing or its contemporary equivalent, pixel manipulation.

Thankfully, More had the good sense to agree with Ms. Curtis. It was rewarded for its wisdom by the greatest positive reader reaction in the history of the magazine that translated into a huge bump in audited readership.

For the most part, the mind of the market today wants the unvarnished truth. It is beyond the contrived world of youth where appearances count for more than substance. Be honest or be gone, it says. Because Dove doesn’t understand this I now have to spend a good chunk of my valuable time changing a series of PowerPoint slides and altering a heretofore important slice of content in many of my presentations on today’s markets.

 

Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times

Strategic Action #4 for Surviving and Thriving:
Connect With the Zeitgeist (Part 2)

Discomfort in mind and body often triggers cravings for iconic palliatives. For a child, a soiled, battered but much loved cuddly may do the job. Around our house, such times are met with comfort food, such as chicken soup heavily laced with fresh garlic or Cousin Ruthie's hamburger, green bean and mashed potato casserole.

Today, many are looking for comfort food for their spirits. They seek relief for their unsettled souls everywhere - in politics, religion and commerce. Their need to be consoled shows up with numbing regularity in everyday conversation. Craving for comfort is ubiquitous. It suffuses the zeitgeist - the "spirit of the times.”

In yesterday's post I attributed Barack Obama's meteoric rise from a seat in the Illinois state senate just over three years ago to now having a good shot at becoming the world's most powerful leader to his uncanny connection with the zeitgeist. I noted that much of the electorate ironically seems less influenced by problem solutions offered by candidates than by their leadership styles.

Politicians aren't the only ones whose success is tied to how well they reflect the contemporary zeitgeist. People often look to brands, unconsciously or otherwise, for comfort when they feel besieged by a barrage of unsettling events and conditions.

I once met a corporate lawyer who would often sought relief from stress in a Sharper Image store near his office. The Sharper Image's offbeat products provided welcome distraction from his troubles of the moment.

Anthropologie, the women's apparel and home accessories store is a comfort brand. Its layout and inventory do for many women what the Sharper Image did for the hyperstressed lawyer.

Harley-Davidson is a quintessential comfort brand. It provides relief from discomfiture by allowing people to indulge a rebellious urge in socially acceptable ways. As Lee Lynch of Carmichael Lynch, Harley's ad agency of record says, "There's a little bit of Harley in each of us. Even nuns have the urge once in a while to break a rule. Breaking a small rule can help us feel healthy separateness from conventions that render us invisible as individuals.

The core paradigms of traditional marketing have undergone massive change. In fact, they have become obsolete. Throughout the 21^st century, an ethos of hucksterism was the dominant paradigm. Its practice reduced consumers to mere numbers and selling to fulfilling quotas. Companies claimed to be interested in consumers as human beings but everyone knew it was a lie.

The older, more experienced and wiser mind of the market today rejects hucksterism. It expects companies to establish empathetic connections with consumers and to regard them with true understanding and compassion.

The new marketing paradigm is based on marketers as healers, not as hucksters. Customers want to be rid of confusion, complexity and chaos in their lives. They want to be whole - to have lives marked by clarity, simplicity and order. They want their religious leaders to show the way, their political leaders to help make it happen and the companies whose products they buy to collaborate with them in becoming healthy and whole in mind, body and spirit.

Next: More examples of companies that have connected with the zeitgeist and adopted the healing paradigm in their marketing

 

The Social Transformation in Retailing

Last Saturday I spoke before the DDI Forum 2004 in Santa Monica, CA, a convocation of leaders in retail store planning. DDI (for Display & Design Ideas) is the leading trade publication for store planners.

I came away from the session with a much-altered view of the future in retailing than I arrived with. I have been part of a probable majority that believes retailers generally have little interest in customers beyond the objective of separating them from as much of their money as possible.

I saw signs at the DDI Forum of changing attitudes among retailers that will lead to serious qualitative improvements in the customer experience in the future. Staffing stores with rude, untutored and uncaring sales associates and clerks will be tantamount to committing economic suicide.

Interestingly, in conversations with store planners and client representatives from the likes of Neiman-Marcus, Silverfish, Target and Starbuck’s, I sensed that more than pragmatism is behind this emergent more caring view of customers. Many of the mostly middle aged store planners and client representatives I met seem to have transferred their own desires for superior customer relationships to their professional agendas.

The application of a heightened sense of humanism is not limited to the customer experience. Forum attendees spoke animatedly about taking better care of workers and helping suppliers to be more successful. This is a huge departure from the past when retailers and suppliers often behaved like the Hatfields and McCoys.

Noticeably missing from DDI Forum 2004 was gargantuan retailer Wal-Mart who is struggling with public relations problems stemming from growing allegations of immoral exploitation of workers and suppliers alike.

My good friend and consumer researcher par excellence Harvey Hartman says Wal-Mart lacks soul, a deficiency that will seriously challenge its growth plans in the not-distant future.

In contrast, I found a lot of corporate soul at DDI Forum 2004 reflected by some of the America’s leading retail names. That cheers me a lot, especially after so many agreed with my keynote idea that the most successful retailers in the future will have replaced the traditional huckster paradigm with a new paradigm by which a retailer helps customers process their lives to reach ever higher levels of human expressiveness and joy. No one thought I was too foo foo.