Marketing is dead; long live business
A must-read review of the top 3 marketing books of 2011 provides a quick way to get up to date on the real challenges every business faces in the mission-critical game of staying connected to customers. It goes way beyond marketing.
Simon Mainwaring
We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
David A. Aaker
Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant
(Jossey-Bass, 2011)
Gary Vaynerchuk
The Thank You Economy
(Harper Business, 2011)
“At first glance, the three best business books of 2011 on marketing seem to go in very different directions. However, they do share one trait: They pay only lip service to marketing. A couple of decades ago that might have disqualified them from consideration, but these days, a surprising number of marketing books aren’t all that high on marketing…
“The real action is in the much tougher arena of rethinking the companies that sell the brands. So, in We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World, brand consultant Simon Mainwaring ponders the role of the corporation in addressing the world’s ills, tackling such topics as charitable giving, environmentalism, and sustainability. In Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant, David A. Aaker, professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, looks at how companies can build brands that aren’t just new and improved, but unequaled. And in The Thank You Economy, wine-selling social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk advocates that marketers build a culture in which “good intent” is paramount. In each case, the authors emphasize that making these things happen requires fundamental shifts in corporate culture, not just marketing window dressing.
“Yes, marketing is no longer about simple brand repositioning, but about corporate reinvention”
The clarion call may appear idealistic, but it’s eminently practical: specifically, what it takes to survive. This review cuts to the chase. Take a deep breath, sharpen your red pencil, bring in your best thinkers, and be ready to rethink your strategy and culture. The three best marketing books of 2011 demand no less than being a responsible citizen, an inventor of new games, and operating with impeccable manners.
“Only the companies that can figure out how to mind their manners in a very old-fashioned way — and do it authentically — are going to have a prayer of competing.” - The Thank You Economy
Filed under Culture, Marketing, Strategy | Comment (1)Love Your Customers?
Many of us have been reflecting deeply about what might re-power the economy as well as boost our own and our customers’ businesses. There’s certainly no shortage of clamoring, but little feels trustworthy.
Browsing the new Strategy & Business Fall issue, I was struck by a couple of points:
- The winners in the digital economy are those closest to customers
- The companies that win at innovation are not those that invest more dollars in R&D; the winners are those who align strategy & culture to innovation.
- (Of course the latter requires the former, as Prahalad and Krishnan aptly demonstrated.)
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose? As a Business Anthropologist, intending no disrespect for an excellent business magazine and the journeyman research it reports, my first response was, “Duh.” But how many businesses have employed Prahalad’s formulae? Do we know what’s missing?
Though everything seems to be changing, in fact many of the dynamics of commerce remain constant. People do business with those they trust. And who is that? Those who demonstrate understanding of their ways and regard for their concerns.
My esteemed teacher, Humberto Maturana, articulated what he called the biology of love: “The other is a legitimate other in coordination with me” (the other’s concerns are equally legitimate to my own.) Commerce is a form of coordination – a form of relating – that engages all of our brains’ emotional wiring. And thus, as we approach the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., I invite you to articulate your love for your customers.
What I love about my customers is their ongoing passion for learning and stepping up to add more and more value. If you are among them, please accept my gratitude for being on this learning journey with me, and for your commitment to looking after your employees, customers, and communities.
Think love is not important in business? That couldn’t be what’s missing? I invite you to begin this holiday season by letting your customers know what you love about them. See if that doesn’t open ways to get closer to them, to better understand their concerns, and to deepen trust.
Try holding their concerns as equal to your own. When you realize that will require shifts in strategy and culture – no matter what size your business or division – you’ll know you’re on the right track.
Filed under Brand promise, Business Anthropologist | Comment (1)got golden handcuffs?
Last week the cover of the Economist headlined BE AFRAID, Occupy Wall Street grew by giant steps around the US (in Portland, OR, where I live, the mayor and police joined ‘the 99%’,) and the balance of power shifted yet again in Syria.
David Berreby’s excellent article in Strategy & Business argues that we modern humans are actually well-adapted to live in this kind of a world. It’s a fresh and well-researched view of what it means to be fit for the Information Age reality, what puts us at our best, and our natural urge for freedom. One CEO
… put an end to all the complaints in one swoop, when he switched the teams from salaries and work rules to a hunter ethos: a team gets 26 percent of the company’s take from a client. How and when it works is up to the team. Productivity has almost doubled…
Freedom and responsibility are the very best golden handcuffs there are…
I happened also to review this TED talk by Harvard researcher Dan Gilbert, arguing that, no matter what happens, we’re psychologically adapted to be happy about it. (Predictions to the contrary, a lottery winner and a new paraplegic are equally happy one year after the event…) Most of us our are short on friends who are happy about the Euro crisis and the financial industry in general, nor are they likely to happy about it in a year’s time, but there’s some good pondering here. Gilbert’s research shows pretty clearly that we’re strongly inclined to make it all OK. And yesterday a BBC health news article goes further into how the brain ‘rejects negative thoughts.
I am inclined to agree. The weak ties that enable innovation, as Richard Ogle demonstrated in Smart World, are key to forging new ways to thrive in our fast-changing reality. Berreby argues that they come naturally
Perhaps the information economy, that purely human creation, reproduces our ancestral environment, replacing literal landscapes and foraging with a virtual version.
…changes promote autonomy, flexibility and “weak ties” and that the “changes associated with post-industrial systems” are “more compatible with humans’ biological nature than those occurring in earlier ones.
You probably believe that the ability to learn is the sine qua non in business. And maybe you’re on to your own and others’ desire for freedom and autonomy as the ultimate golden handcuffs. Certainly some leaders have learned to put them to good use.
So we like to learn, we’re good at change – but we have a tendency to tell ourselves that things are better than they are.
How much trouble are we really in?
And how might we know? What combination of models and thinkers might help us see beyond our biases and blindness?
Got any ideas?
Filed under Business Anthropologist, Changing Economic patterns | Comment (0)Immune to Change?
One of the toughest parts of leading is the amount of change facing an enterprise: economic, social, climatic, political, demographic, technological. It can feel like an assault, and typically it feels like it’s ‘out there’. That’s part of the problem.
There are many reasons why it’s hard for businesses to change appropriately in response, and many factors to address grasping the challenges of current business fitness and getting in shape for change. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey take a cognitive tack in their book, Immunity to Change, providing a practical model and a nice set of examples. Executives are invited to illuminate the hidden commitments that are opposing their good intentions, and preventing them from realizing desired objectives. Armed with this information, they can revisit objectives and action plans, making them more effectively.
It’s well researched, well-written, and well worth a read.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)my kinda guy
We recently lost one of our great thinkers, C.K. Prahalad.
“To me, the problems of greatest interest are things that you cannot explain with the current prevailing theory.”
I often wish I could ask him about items that flash on my screen, eg Is the US Bankrupt and Nobody Knows? Are the Feds finally facing the reality of the ‘recession’?
This recent article from Strategy & Business is a treat: a highly accessible and altogether inspiring peek at C.K.’s genius. While he tended to write about large systems, everything he says is as relevant to micro-business and non-profits as giant multinationals. I invite you to take a moment, step back from whatever you’re working on, and let C.K.’s thinking have its way with your molecules.
“What is the essence of entrepreneurship?…Having aspirations greater than your resources.”
Sound like a good fit to your current reality?
Management thinking prior to his writing looks medieval. Remember how organizations appeared before the concept of core competence? When resources were purely financial? Or strategy took place in a fixed world? In their groundbreaking 1994 book, Competing for the Future, he and Gary Hamel
“argued for strategy as a stretch: by definition, creating a misfit between your resources and your aspirations… If you want to create entrepreneurial drive in a large company, you have to create aspirations that lie outside your resource base…”
“Gary and I said strategy is about creating new competitive space. This foreshadowed ideas like strategic architecture, shaping your future, expeditionary marketing, and so on.”
Having addressed those small matters, in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, C.K. went head-on with what seemed impossible: profitably serving the [then] 2.5 billion people living on less than $2/day. I’ve often wondered about the source of that thinking; it’s revealed in the excellent S&B interview by Art Kleiner. When asked how he came up with such different ideas,
“…both are about the movement of ordinary people into new relationships with power.”
“I started as an industrial engineer, but all along I’ve been struggling with the same question: What makes societies work?”
“Conventional strategy didn’t even consider individuals. When a company looked at its resources, it considered its financial situation: could it afford another employee or not, for example, rather than what kind of new employee must it bring aboard.”
“But when you look at an organization’s core competencies as its most valuable resources, you can begin to think of learning, creating strategy, and innovation as parts of a single long journey. The journey is iterative, interactive, and full of small steps. Nobody gets a big aha one day. Instead, there is searching; there are missteps, experiments, and doubt.”
Perhaps a nice dose of C.K. will put you in shape to redesign how you’re putting your resources to work?
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)To increase your value, mind your promises
There’s no doubt that our economic world has changed and continues to change. And there’s little doubt that most people don’t like change – Neuro scientists agree – a great majority experience ambiguity as a threat. Further, the worst threat of all is heightened in a shifting economy: that we might lose, we might be rejected – not included in the exchanges of our choice.
Exchanging with others is how we humans thrive. We have a strong desire to contribute – it’s in our biology. Not surprisingly, our brains are well-equipped with wiring about exchanges, both as contributors and as recipients. Much of what goes on ‘inside our heads’ is about where we stand with others, the value we provide and what they provide us, who we can trust and for what, and whether people genuinely know and care about us.
We can spark ingenuity by focusing on others’ vulnerability and how we want to serve them – and we quickly becoming energized. As a Business Anthropologist, I would like everyone to view commerce as an opportunity. Though the brain can’t do that in the context of a threat, fear is automatically trumped when we’re faced with ‘our people’s’ concerns. We’ll jump into a freezing river, or whatever it takes.
Day-to-day commerce is somewhat less heroic – to the consternation of some and the relief of others. In the modern world, we are called upon to articulate what others can rely on us for. During most of human history – the 3 million years when the brain and society were evolving together – our ancestors knew their trading partners their entire lives. They did not have to design new exchanges, articulate brand promises, and engage in sales conversations. But we do. Much as we might like it to be otherwise, other people do not automatically know what we can promise. We have to tell them if we want them to know.
Though it may not get your adrenalin spurting like an emergency plane landing, being current with the value you add is your primary responsibility. Worse, in a shifting world – though you may not like ambiguity nor view it as an opportunity, peoples’ concerns change, and as they do, you’ll probably be called upon to update your promises. I invite you to ask:
- What do you want others to rely on you for?
- What’s the most valuable promise you can make (and reliably deliver?)
Fortunately, our brains are highly wired for that very question: to both make the promise and to consider the value of others’ promises. (We’re built to orient ourselves to exchanging with others.) Promises reduce ambiguity. Being mindful of what you promise will increase your value and make you a desirable trading partner.
What might you promise this year, this month, this week, today, to address others’ concerns?
Filed under Brand promise, Changing Economic patterns | Comment (1)Time to Reposition?
I listened to a podcast with Jack Trout of Positioning fame – indisputably one of the greats – a day or two ago. He has a new book, Repositioning: Marketing in an Era of Competition, Change and Crisis. The question set me to wondering whether –given the impact of economic, climatic, social and political concerns in the last 18 months – we aren’t all facing the challenge to reposition.
Asked why his original 1987 book is still a must-read (probably by someone who hadn’t read it), he politely pointed out that the subtitle says it all: The Battle for Your Mind. He went on to clarify yet again that marketing takes place in the mind of the prospect.
It’s remarkable to me that so many marketers – some highly paid – still don’t get that point. The 12 bloggers in this recent eBook - including yours truly – implore marketers to learn to tune into the mindset of their customers in 2010. This is still a necessary reminder after all these years??? Trout jokes in the podcast that even now, when he’s brought in to ‘fix’ a brand [one assumes for significant fees], many on the marketing team are obviously counting the minutes till he leaves, when they go back to doing exactly as they were doing before he got there
There’s little doubt that prospects’ worlds have shifted significantly in the last 18 months. The question of repositioning certainly seems warranted. How might each of us serve those new mindsets?
Another imperative to Reposition came across my screen same day, in a new article in Strategy and Business
We already know that companies with an articulated purpose that goes beyond simply the expediency of “making more money” have fared much better in the downturn. They will also fare better in the recovery.
I’m off to buy the book.
Filed under Brand promise, Changing Economic patterns, Resilient Enterprises | Comment (0)Learning as a Strategic Investment
I recently contributed to an eBook targeted to Pharma and Healthcare marketers. The book, intending to guide its audience toward where to invest their learning in 2010, is directly relevant to anyone in business. It begins with the famous Toffler quote
The illiterate of the 21stcentury will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
-Alvin Toffler, Rethinking the Future 1999
Since he wrote those powerful words, 9 years after the publication of Senge’s Fifth Discipline, web 2.0 has exploded, and the challenges of choosing where to learn and what to learn are bursting exponentially -changing patterns of trade and social power on the planet.
Jim Collins says it well in a Fast Company interview:
FC: What has changed if you’re building a business now, as opposed to 10, 20, or 30 years ago?
JC: The skills. You need to be continually learning. For example, if you accept the idea that work is infinite and time is finite, you realize you have to manage your time and not your work. You need a laserlike focus on doing first things first. And that means having a ferocious understanding of what you are not going to do. The question used to be which phone call you wouldn’t take. Now, it’s the discipline not to have your e-mail on. The skill is knowing how to sift through the blizzard of information that hits you all the time.
As a Business Anthropologist, I am fascinated by how social media are changing the world of learning. Sunday’s New York Times re-iterates how Twitter works as a learning portal – for approximately 10% of its users, according to a 2009 Harvard study. With over 1000 user-designed applications, no one has quite figured out how many people that is… a telling commentary.
Close to the beginning of the revolution represented by social media, I undertook a study of 50 top performers, asking about how they rejuvenate. They recognized that,
The ability to be a ‘beginner’ is a key factor in sustained top performance….Forty eight consciously keep their curiosity sparked through exploration and learning.
“What I’m doing now was totally beyond me 12 months ago.”
– Entrepreneur, age 72
In my 3 decades in the trenches with business leaders, nothing seems to have gotten easier. Most would agree that the changes of the past 15 months demand more skill than ever, and a new kind of skill: being nimble in the face of uncertainty.
I cast my vote with Senge, Toffler and Collins: the ability to learn is our single best strategic investment. The evidence goes back to the first human communities.
Our ancestors have done it for millions of years. We can do it again. How will you choose your strategic learning investments this year?
Filed under Business Anthropologist, Changing Economic patterns, Leading Through Inquiry, Resilient Enterprises, Social media | Comment (0)Little Guys Have the Advantage in a Recession
http://www.goodlittlebiz.com/node/518
Filed under Changing Economic patterns, Navigating the downturn | Comment (0)Business is a Social Activity – A Business Anthropologist's View
For many, the insight that business is social is something of a surprise. In much of Western tradition, work and play are viewed as a dichotomy: business falls in the former, and sociality in the latter. But that’s not how the brain is organized. New insights from Neuroscience clarify how the brain functions to keep us focused on others (with emotions – ever heard of them?) A recent article from Strategy and Business explores the implications for managers.
Through the lens of Business Anthropology, it’s apparent that trading is old as the first human communities. Commerce is in our biology. Though I’ve been writing about that for decades, it’s delightful to see what Social Cognitive NeuroScience labs are revealing with fMRI studies; businesses large and small can seize new opportunities.
Our brains naturally respond to change as though it’s dangerous, and shut down our ‘thinking centers’ rather than firing them up. But we can train our brains to be ingenious when exposed to risk. I’m with Jim Collins’ assessment that the ability to face uncertainly with curiosity is the most important skill of our times. Neuroscience illuminates the challenge as well as how to focus on the desired competences.
Unfortunately, our brains are not geared to be effective in the face of ongoing stress like a global recession. We don’t tend to get smart. But we humans have a rare gift: we retain plasticity into adulthood. We can learn new moves. And the current business environment certainly demands that we do so.
Perhaps most important to my practice over 3 decades is understanding how we’re inclined to respond to vulnerability. On this subject, current Neuroscience research is stunning. Even when informed that a situation is simulated – even using cartoons and stick figures – smart people feel intense pain of rejection and strong pleasure of belonging and contributing.
The actions we take, the decisions we make, the possibilities we recognize are determined by this powerful programming. Focusing on the vulnerabilities of others inspires our best work. We become ingenious. We can spark our enterprises and fire customers’ curiosity and commitment.
Solopreneurs and small business have a huge advantage in using this force, because we can be so nimble. We can quickly respond to emerging vulnerability and invent new ways to add value. Our forebears have done so for 150,000 generations – that’s how we got here. Any business can be vulnerability-centric. It’s the most powerful force at hand.
Have examples? Please share!
Filed under Business Anthropologist, neuroscience in business | Comment (1)
