Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

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!

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.

 

 

 

 

The Roots of My Optimism

Nature endowed our frontal lobes with the ability to look beyond the present moment into time ahead. However the farther cognitively removed we are from the present, the more likely our predictions about the future will prove wrong. This is especially true when some disruptive event explodes in our midst to nullify our customary way of seeing things.  The printing press did this over five centuries ago. The Internet did this less than two decades ago.

The Internet has altered in measurable ways virtually every aspect of human life. It has radically changed how business operates. Even the most astute science fiction writer could not have anticipated the magnitude of the Internet on business.  For instance who in 1990 would have predicted the emergence of a new business model in which company’s most important consumer products are free – such as they are on craigslist.com, Google and an assortment of social media sites.   

Ponder how Amazon’s has transformed the book selling business.  Think about Wikipedia’s radical disruption of the encyclopedia business. Overnight, a $1,400 set of Encyclopedia Britannica lost virtually all its value to most people. Free Wikipedia was not only a hundred times larger, but according to a study by the British journal Nature, just about as accurate.

Customers talking to each other reveal the pros and cons of products and companies on a daily basis.  People now trade stocks on line at a fraction of the cost in pre-Internet times.   Homebuyers go around the close-knit, incestuous Realtor ® community in search for new homes.  Thanks to Skype and other voice over Internet protocols, you can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world without a long distance charge.

The list of technological, economic, social and cultural disruptions in our lives due to the Internet since 1990 or so is astonishingly long. But, the Internet is only one source of life-changing, world-changing disruptive forces that are radically changing the human experience in virtually every way conceivable.

An aging population is radically changing the dynamics of supply and demand.  With most adults now over 45, big houses, full closets and years of materialistic fulfillment are resulting in falling per capita spending in dozens of categories.  Exacerbating this trend is the shrinking number of people under 45 in developed nations around the world – the result of over 35 years of too few births annually to replace the population.

Advancements in science in portend enormous disruptions – many for the betterment of the human condition. For example, genomic and medical research has caused scientists to cautiously predict the end of diabetes, many cancers (if not all) and a long list of inherited diseases like Huntington’s.

Even the dismal science is seeing benign disruptive developments. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate for his work in using microloans to bail millions of families out of abject poverty has plans that he claims will eliminate poverty worldwide by 2025 – just 13 years from now. This from a man thought by traditional bankers to be more than a bit unrealistic when he proposed to them using microloans to life people out of poverty. Microlending for this purpose has now become a sizeable industry.

Think back 14 years to 1994 and reflect on all of the unpredicted breakthroughs that have occurred in field after field.  The Internet browser, Netscape appeared in 1994. When asked his opinion of its importance, Bill Gates replied, “It’s a trivial thing.”  Yet, the browser transformed the world in ways that no other communications artifact ever has.

Also in 1994, teams at the University of Innsbruck and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology executed the first successful teleportation task. Granted, their accomplishment was far from the impressive actions of Scottie’s teleportation device aboard the Starship Enterprise. But it still was enough even at the quantum scale to confirm its possibility (though I wouldn’t recommending shorting airline stocks just yet.

And here’s another Starship Enterprise technology just beginning to emerge: remember the replicator that Enterprise crew members used to make ham and cheese sandwiches from assorted atoms and molecules? A primitive semblance of the enterprise’s replicator has reached the marketplace in the past decade – only it’s called a “3-d fax machine.” It is yet to reproduce the organic stuff in a ham and cheese sandwich, but

We are in a period of bifurcation – a “crossroads between death and transformation,” as Margaret Wheatley says, when a system is at maximum instability. The Soviet Union entered a state of bifurcation in 1985, fated to reach maximum instability in 1990 and collapse into separate states in 1991. Many in the U.S. smirked and proclaimed absolute victory over socialism. Yet today, the U.S. economic system has been massively disrupted by actions of the most doctrinaire conservative administration in U.S. history. Several weeks ago it blinked during a moment of “maximum instability” and nationalized much of America’s leading financial organizations.

 Living through times like these is a scary, and for many, a deeply painful experience. In such moments it is hard to see far beyond the present. Yet, I am full of optimism about the future. I feel throughout my entire being the winds of change that are blowing away the detritus of worn-out ideas and ways of managing our governments, our companies and indeed our own lives.  Once more, as Tom Stoppard reminds us in his play Arcadia, “The future is disorder. A door like this has opened up five or six times since we got up on our hind legs.  It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you k new is wrong.”

The political, economic, cultural storms we are living through are precedent to the most extraordinary age of comfort and plenty in the history of humankind. Deconstruction has always preceded reconstruction in the long journey of human progress from the days of the first hand-wrought tools.

 

 

 

10 Ideas That Are Really Changing the World

Do you ever wonder how people come up with numbered lists like the Ten Sexiest Sons of silicon Valley or
Five Ways to Get Even with Your _ _ _ hole Boss. This week’s Time cover story is about 10 ideas that are changing the world. I wonder how Time''s editors came up with that list. To save you the newsstand price of $4.95, here are the 10 ideas that Time avers are changing the world:

#1 Common Wealth: how we must work together globally to avoid the dinosaurs’ fate.

#2 The End of Customer Service: Sales clerks are being replaced by technology.

#3 The Post-Movie Star Era: Movie success will depend on stories not famous faces.

#4 Reverse Radicalism: Talking to retired terrorists will show us how to end terrorism.

#5 Kitchen Chemistry: Home cooking will morph from art to science.

#6 Geoengineering: Zillions of mirrors in space could end global warming.

#7 Synthetic Authenticity: People like fake if it feels, looks, smells, sounds and tastes real.

#8 The New Austerity: People are going to start living within their means.

#9 Mandatory Health: Companies are going to make employees live healthy lives.

#10 Re-Judaizing Jesus: Jesus was a Jew after all. Get used to it!

 
There. I’ve not only saved you $4.95 and possibly some sales tax, but the 20 – 30 minutes you would have Except for #1 (which is not revelatory) and #6 (which could just be science fiction) Time’s list of world-changing ideas are about as intellectually worthy as contemplating the downward flow of a bubble of dew.

Time’s writers embellish the 10 articles with audacious hyperbole as though terms of exaggeration can impart gravitas that is otherwise missing. For example, in pontificating about #7, Time writer John Cloud describes my good friend Joe Pine (The Experience Economy and more recently Authenticity) and his partner Jim Gilmore as “legendary business consultants.”  I should think that Joe, who seems always to be rolling a toothpick around in his mouth, would feel a little embarrassed by that characterization, especially because it appears in an article that cites his book Authenticity. I know Joe. He’s much more real than legendary.

Of what importance is it that home cooks are going to start thinking of preparing supper as a scientific act? In the first place, I am hard pressed to believe that prediction.

Time’s audacious claim to be offering to readers “10 ideas that are changing the world” stands as a profoundly shallow reading of the world of today. Less than useless, the articles are not even mildly engaging.

So, even as I have yet to finish my series of occasional posts to “Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times,” I am going to start a new series: “10 Ideas That Are Changing the World.”   I will use many of the 10 categories in Time’s cover piece to show that Time’s writers missed the really big ideas in those categories that are changing the world -- and having direct relevance to us all.
 

Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times

Strategic Action #3 for Surviving and Thriving:
Adapt Your Life to Web 2.0 (Part 1)

Turning Your Company into a Complex Adaptive System

The real miracle of life is arguably not as much its existence per se – a California biotech company announced last week that it had created a human embryo from adult skin cells – as the complex system of biofeedback on which organisms depend.

Now, in a case of technology imitating life, the Worldwide Web has evolved into a higher cyberlife form called Web 2.0 that is animated by Web-based software in contrast with Web 1.0, which depends on external software such as browsers for its viability. Exactly how biofeedback systems work is still not completely understood by scientists.

Web.2.0 operates with a highly complex system of cyberfeedback that gives users instant readings – kind of like what happens every nanosecond in your body to keep it on an even keel on a proper course.

Among the most prominent expressions of Web 2.0 are Wikipedia, Facebook, My Space, Flickr, YouTube, Second Life and World of Warcraft. They are collectively known as social media because participants are co-creators of the content. Before the advent of social media, website owners were the primary producers of online content.

Web 2.0 takes the Internet as a complex adaptive system to soaring new heights of complexity. This is analogous to what happened three billion years after single-cell life showed up on earth: life began blossoming in higher, more complex multi-cell forms.

Take Wikipedia, for example. Like all organisms it functions in a continuing stream of change and adaptation. Of course, there are those who say, "Wikipedia cannot be as dependable a source of information as its primeval ancestor, Encyclopedia Britannica because you have all those people going into entries to change them at will."

Seen through the lens of traditional consciousness (see the previous two posts), there is every reason to assume that Wikipedia is subject to enough error to justify healthy suspicion about its accuracy. But, operating in the fashion of complex adaptive systems, Wikipedia has a self-correcting function that draws on feedback from participants in its organic evolution. The British science journal Nature conducted research last year and found Wikipedia generally comparable in accuracy to Britannica.

Web 2.0 has exponentially increased the available options in service of more productive and efficient use of the Internet. With the cyberspace equivalent of biofeedback, Web 2.0 enables people to share, collaborate and interact as social communities with a richness of experience and bounty of benefits not achievable at the Web 1.0 level of cyber evolution.

From a marketing perspective, Web 2.0 has generated a new calculus of supply and demand. The neat boundaries that have long had actors on the supply side in one sector of the transactional territory and the actors on the demand side in another sector are dissolving. Much as with a Mobius strip there is no front-back, forward-backward, or top-bottom dichotomy.

In the absence of the traditional supply-demand dichotomy, consumers have become active participants in creating value and shaping and mediating supply chain activity. Producers have become active customers of produce from the demand side.

If all this sounds a tad confusing, it’s mainly because it’s not very understandable seen through the traditional lens of economics and marketplace activity (see two previous posts).

An excellent treatise on the impact of Web 2.0 on business, on culture, on just about every sector of human activity can be downloaded from the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program. You will want to download The Rise of Collective Intelligence.

No one really knows where Web 2.0 is going to take us, but a broad consensus holds that performing all the functions of business enterprise from research and product development to marketing and service will be radically different in the next decade than it was when this decade began. 

I will speak more to the subject of collective intelligence, which is at the very core of Web 2.0's transformative powers in my next post.

 

Strategic Action #3 for Surviving and Thriving:
Adapt Your Life to Web 2.0 (Part 1)

Turning Your Company into a Complex Adaptive System

Strategic Action #3 for Surviving and Thriving:
Adapt Your Life to Web 2.0 (Part 1)

Turning Your Company into a Complex Adaptive System

Nature's Rule of Survival: Grow or Go

A much valued friend, Richard Adler of People & Technology who is doing a landmark study of boomers in collaboration with the Institute for the Future, just told me of a book that I must read: Holy Fire, by Bruce Sterling. Many sci-fi fans will fondly remember Sterling as a collaborator with William Gibson in such books as The Difference Engine, Heavy Weather, etc.

In my last post I wrote, “Today, we are witnessing the ongoing struggle to improve humankind’s condition as efforts to do so take us into new, higher and more complex states of human beingness.” I then promised to say more about this in the next post. In the meantime, Richard sent me this quote from Holy Fire:

“The human condition is over.  Nature is over. Art is over. Consciousness is ductile.  Science is an infinite powder keg. We confront a new reality formerly obscured by the inbuilt limits of mammalian primates.  We must create work which brings this new reality to the surface, a sequence of seemingly gratuitous gestures which will form in their aggregate the consciousness of posthumanity.

“At the same, politically, we must not shatter the fragile surface tension of an aging human civilization that pretends to utopian tranquility but is secretly traumatized beyond all possibility of healing. Beneath the repellent husk of the dying humanist agenda, we must systematically alter the physiological basis of cognition and the state of culture, and bear an honest, objective and unpretentious witness to the results.  That is the basic nature of our program as artificers.”

Does that not sound eerily like the challenging irony of Tom Stoppard issued through the lips of the mathematician Valentine in Stoppard’s 1994 play, Arcadia (which I have quoted a couple of times in this space):

The future is disorder.
A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs.
It’s the best possible time to be alive,
when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

In Ray Kurzweil’s recent look into the future, Singularity Is Near, he describes a fusion of biology and technology not many years ahead that results in a higher performing version of our present day selves. Washington Post journalist Joel Garreau claims in Radical Evolution that within 15 years we will have available to us virtually all the powers of superheroes in 1950’s comic books.

But even the biology side of our existence is experiencing evolution toward a higher form of humanness. In September 2005 I attended a presentation in St. Gallen, Switzerland in which a scientist described a longitudinal study that shows significant gains in human intelligence over the years.

The study revealed substantial cohort / generational differences. Later-born groups have attained successively higher scores at the same ages for inductive reasoning, verbal meaning, and spatial          orientation. While these changes presumably reflect educational changes, there is also evidence of genetic changes in intelligence.

Perhaps someday our descendents will look upon us as we look upon the heavy browed Neanderthal: dim-minded creatures unable to survive new conditions in the environment.

One thing is true, for sure. It seems to be a fundamental law of nature that organic life, if not in fact all things, tend to move toward higher and more complex states of existence when not otherwise moved toward entropy. You can move forward or backward, but you can never stay in place. Nature abhors the status quo. To live and thrive we must fulfill biologists’ definition of growth: the movement of an organism from a lower and simpler state to a higher and more complex state. This appears to hold true for species as well as individuals and I propose that it also holds true for whole societies and their institutions, from governmental to business.

We must grow or go.

More to come …

That #@!!&# Computer!

See today’s Washington Post article, “Human Responses to Technology Scrutinized” accessible for several days at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20688-2004Jun6.html. It deals with people’s emotional reactions to inanimate objects – like when you hit your computer (as 75% of people reportedly do) when it coldly announces, “You have performed and illegal operation.”

We know at a conscious level that computers have no life of their own. But tell that to neurons operating unconsciously deep in our midbrains. They think otherwise. And it’s not just computers they think of as viable organisms. My wife’s brain obviously sees her green Subaru that way. When passing a red Subaru, Linda will pat Emmie’s (for Emerald) dashboard and point out “There’s your cousin Ruby.”

My wife’s not weird. Just uninhibited about acknowledging that we evaluate and perceive everything in terms of human attributes.

Cognitive scientists say we only understand objects outside ourselves by viewing them through the lens of our humanness. Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass report in The Media Equation that even nerdy types who deny that their computers have human qualities unconsciously treat them as humans.

After reading The Media Equation you will never see your computer the same way. You will also never look at what you do in marketing the same way. Drawing from their discovery that we use the same social rules in interacting with media as we use in interacting with each other as humans, Reeves and Nass lay down more than 40 rules for executing marketing messages.