Marketing

There are new bedfellows in the world of communications.

I had an interesting week of facilitating workshops and guest lecturing. Standing in front of people and trying to add value – acting like (as my late uncle used to say) I knew what I was doing.

Two key takeaways from the week of acting like I knew what I was doing:

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Mos Def gave an interview at the end of a performance with K’Naan on Austin City Limits not long ago. (You can view the episode here and the interviews here.) Apparently this was the first hip hop episode for the venerable country-cum-Americana-jam/hippy-band show. It was also the first time I heard such a genuinely honest response by a creative mind to the all-too-common question of inspiration.

You could see Mos Def hesitate at first. A self-censored moment where he wondered if a transparent answer would somehow mitigate the fantasy we put around artists in the entertainment industry – the necessary fantasy for him and those like him to sell records and fill concert halls. But he came through, mos def:

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A few cows I ran into during a recent trip to Naskik, India.

Here we go again. Another joke at the expense of the ever stupid and boorish client providing me with another opportunity for my soapbox: the ad agency industry is struggling to demonstrate its value in today’s radically changing marketing landscape. It needs to put an end to its practice of openly disrespecting those who look to them to add value. It doesn’t help.

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Think about what it would be like if you started from scratch. If there was no such thing as advertising agencies. No preconceived notions.

You have a big entrepreneurial idea. You figure you could  start a business that solves problems for companies by executing efforts that reach new customers and motivates them to buy something. You’d integrate other efforts with those efforts that would retain existing customers, too. And probably a few reputation-building efforts thrown in to make sure stuff like the company’s social license to operate is in good order, and that various stakeholders feel good about their investment in the company.

If you were to start from scratch, you’d probably do a bunch of research to figure out what companies’ pain points are, what they’d expect, and what they’d be willing to pay for it.

My guess is you’d find companies with pretty basic needs. Get us lots of customers, make our existing ones so happy that they buy again while telling others to come to us, and give our other stakeholders a good feeling about their investment in us.

I’m guessing you’d also find plenty of companies willing to pay handsomely for that, so long as you can prove what it is you’re doing actually works. My guess is that your research would conclusively demonstrate that any investment a company makes must demonstrate a return, and the investment made in your activities would be no different. Management and stakeholders wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Ed Stein, EdSteinInk.com, reprinted with permission

If the current dialog about health care reform can teach us anything, it highlights the importance of figuring out our values.

We all know the importance of inside-out strategic planning (and brand development, for those who consider them separate). The enterprise values, vision, and mission (brand) should be a collective exercise. Involve as many people as possible. Hold retreats, perform exercises, play games, put the words of participants on giant sticky notes. Transform the more insightful quotes into pictures on the graphical strategy map. Include verbatims in the final deliverable. Stage-gate the process by communicating back to the larger enterprise during development.

And we’ve all seen the process devolve and the gears grind. Collaboration turns into open season across units: operations launch scuds at market verticals, marketing challenges revenue models. Anyone can write copy — wordsmith-ing hijacks strategy.

Then at some point getting the damn thing done trumps involvement. Can we just move on already? I’ve got work to do.

How to avoid this in strategy and brand development? It’s probably in the values.

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Right around the time Dave Mathews Band broke through with their huge hit Satellite, a friend of mine attending a hippy jam-band show told me about a bumper sticker he saw in the Red Rocks parking lot. It read: “Remember when Dave didn’t suck?”

A recent article from a farmer makes no bones about Michael Pollan and his dilemmic omnivores acting as “Agri-Intellectuals” with no moral authority: one-book experts who think farmers are “too stupid to farm sustainably” and “too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families…Enough,” he writes. “Enough. Enough.”

Crocs, once “the quintessential American success story” with their staggering IPO giving a windfall for fashion laymen in Niwot, Colorado is facing a series of oddly brash predictions of their demise. Crocs is “toast,” and needs to “do the right thing” for shareholders and sell. The ugly shoe we love has somehow become the ugly company we hate.

Today, the jam-band festival of the internet, the gathering place for media-intellectuals, the promised land for laymen content creators is under attack. People are happily pointing out the cracks in social media.

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I connect things. I’m wired to. Sometimes it’s powerful, and sometimes it unnecessarily complicates. It can make for good integrated plans, but it can also result in tangled communications.

The past few weeks have been powerful. I’ve reconnected with two long-lost friends. One’s a guitarist I met while attending Berklee College of Music, the other a magazine editor I worked with for a short stint in my career.

The guitarist moved back to Israel, the editor moved a few blocks away from me. The guitarist I found on Facebook, the editor I found at the neighborhood frozen custard shop.

International, hyperlocal. The reach of social media, the power of sugar and cream.

Two very different people with whom I shared important times during transitional periods in my life. I learned important lessons from both of them. And the lessons connect.

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North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith said Michael Jordan wasn’t the greatest natural athlete he’d ever coached. He said he was among the hardest working. Miles Davis regularly skipped classes at Julliard to practice his horn, eventually dropping out to play every day in the New York bebop scene. Musicians and artists spend almost all of their time practicing to get ready for small windows of execution.

It’s a simple concept: repeat as many skills within as many contexts as often as possible so when it comes time to execute, you aren’t thinking. You’re fully in service to the prime function of the enterprise and its mission.

It’s precisely the opposite in business. We’re executing all the time with hardly any practice. The results are obvious. Time and again we see gaffs far more destructive than an MJ missed dunk. And we blog about it and pass it around the social media sphere, fingers pointed.

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NPR Guy interviewing Health Insurance Guy. Insurance guy* opining about why government run, public health insurance is a bad idea. How it’ll take us all down like some kind of a Mugabe economic initiative.

Insurance Guy is lobbying congress hard on our behalf because the government is inefficient, and the private sector isn’t.

NPR Guy**: Then why worry about it? If you and your company*** are so efficient, shouldn’t the market take care of that? Won’t an inefficient government-run program simply fail?

Great question. A question that cuts to heart of the argument, that exposes the straw man.

Cliff Kuang recently posted on FastCompany and he cuts right to this chase. You don’t bring your Huffy to challenge Lance Armstrong. If you want to beat Lance, you change the game.

The insurance industry should be afraid. They should be lobbying. The competition landscape is changing because a well-funded competitor is entering their space to solve a fundamental problem within it. A solid entrepreneur approach: recognize what’s broken and bring to bear something new to solve it.

The government isn’t interested in competing on the incumbent’s terms. They want to change the game and they have the resources (if not the competency) to do it.

Are you afraid of the competitive landscape defined by the Great Reset or inspired by it?

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* Can you find this guy on Twitter or the blogosphere? I couldn’t.

** Steve Inskeep seems to be the only NPR person without a Twitter handle. He isn’t even on LinkedIn. Am I wrong?

*** Couldn’t find a blog for this company. Twitter accounts seem to be squatters. Can they compete in a world that they aren’t even communicating with?

If I owned an ad agency I think I’d drop the word advertising. And the word agency.

If I owned an ad agency I’d recognize that the talent I have at my disposal is an asset that isn’t disposable.

I’d consider today an opportunity to throw out the model. Not the staff.

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