Describing itself as "a series of events built around a community of doers and thinkers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social consequences of new technologies," Lift is definitely one of the best conference networks out there. Laurent Haug, Lift founder and curator, is a wonderful host and has managed to maintain a strong sense of community despite continued growth. In addition to numerous satellite events with partners, Lift organizes conferences in France and Korea, as well as the annual Lift conference in Switzerland as its main hub.
Lift10 will take place from May 5-7, 2010 in Geneva and welcome 1,000 participants from 40 countries to "explore the most overlooked aspect of innovation: people. Known in the techno-parlance as users, consumers, clients, participants, prosumers, citizens or activists, people ultimately define the success of all technological and entrepreneurial projects. They adopt or refute, promote or demote; embrace, reject, or re-purpose. Their approaches are unique, influenced by cultural and generational diversity. A decade after the rebirth of user-centered design and innovation, it's time to explore the myths and uncover the reality behind the 'connected people.'"
Check out some of the Lift10 speakers that have already been confirmed.
The early-bird deadline just got extended to January 31 – you can register here.
For the first time in 23 years, Pepsi Co. has decided to not run any advertisements during the Super Bowl in 2010. Instead, the nation’s second-biggest soft drink maker is plowing marketing dollars into its "Pepsi Refresh Project," an online community that allows Pepsi fans to list their public service projects, which could range from helping to feed people to teaching children to read. Visitors to the site can vote to determine which projects receive money. The program will pay at least $20 million for projects people create to "refresh" communities. Last year, Pepsi Co. spent $33 million advertising products such as Pepsi, Gatorade, and Cheetos during the Super Bowl, according to TNS Media Intelligence, $15 million of it on Pepsi alone. Ad time last year for the NFL championship game cost about $3 million for 30 seconds, on average. Pepsi Co. spokeswoman Nicole Bradley said Super Bowl ads don’t work with the company's goals next year: "In 2010, each of our beverage brands has a strategy and marketing platform that will be less about a singular event and more about a movement." Pepsi's remarkable decision epitomizes the new paradigms of marketing: Online instead of TV; many-too-many instead of one-too-many; engagement instead of advertising; sharing instead of broadcasting; movements instead of events; communities instead of campaigns.
While one of the world's foremost consumer brands has acknowledged the signs of the times and is making the transition away from one-to-many mass-marketing to social marketing with meaning, marketing theory is struggling to catch up and grasp the new realities. An article on "Rethinking Marketing" (by Roland T. Rust, Christine Moorman, and Gaurav Bhalla) in the January issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) is the latest example. HBR deserves credit for recognizing the need to reinvent marketing, but the piece turns out to be far less radical than its title would suggest. The authors are putting the onus on the customer, demanding that marketers focus on the customer as the sole parameter of their efforts. In their eyes, this requires a shift from "pushing individual products to many customers" through the means of one way mass-marketing to "engaging individual customers in two-way communications,” building "long-term customer relationships" that provide value beyond one-off product promotions. Consequently, the authors argue, the marketing department needs to be reinvented as a "customer department," with the Chief Customer Officer replacing the Chief Marketing Officer, and "product and brand managers subservient to customer managers."
What a depressing read! First of all, the article rehashes existing concepts but doesn’t really offer any kind of "rethinking." To engage customers in two-way, personalized communications rather than marketing individual products to broad audiences is a no-brainer, and after hundreds of books and thousands of best practices it has already become so commonplace in the field that it is hard to believe HBR considers this to be an original concept. It's like social media never happened. On which analog planet did the authors live in the past three years?
The concept of radical customer focus is not entirely new either and has been well-articulated before (i.e. in the book Chief Customer Officer by Jeanne Bliss in 2006, and most recently, with a more anthropological spin, in Chief Culture Officer by Grant McCracken).
But aside from the lack of originality, I also substantively object to the concept itself. While the authors' emphasis on "customer profitability" rather than product profitability and a long-term view on value creation are in theory good intentions (and a response to the demise of the concept of shareholder value, as Roger Martin lays out in his essay on "The Age of Customer Capitalism," also in the HBR January issue), I don't agree with the conclusion to turn the marketing department into the "customer department." Embracing a naive belief in customer-centrism, the HBR authors downgrade marketing to a discipline of tactical execution when in fact this time of disruptive digital technologies and changing consumer behavior presents a tremendous opportunity for marketing to reassert itself as a key strategic function in the enterprise. An extreme customer orientation, as propagated by the authors, ill-conceives the legitimate and important customer perspective. Of course it is paramount to understand customers' needs, of course companies need to ensure customer satisfaction, and of course CEOs always score when they tout the customer as their company’s raison d'etre. But that doesn’t mean the customer is the measure of all things.
The truth is less simplistic than a "customer happy, all good" approach would suggest. In addition to their customers, businesses have other stakeholders to serve: investors, employees, the community, and the broader public, as well as future generations and other constituents that are indirectly affected by the externalization of a company’s business. In fact, one could argue that the customer's demand is mostly short-term, not to say short-sighted, whereas the corporation can and should pursue a long-term perspective on value-creation that combines individual and social value, even if the latter may at times actually conflict with what customers want. Reducing the role of the company to just responding to customer needs drastically limits the critical role businesses can play in society, and it hampers companies' ability to drive real change. When it comes to innovation and marketing (according to the venerable Peter Drucker, these are the only two basic functions of an enterprise, and – if I may add – in good marketing organizations they are one and the same), companies should be empathetic to customers (that is, "Wired to Care," as Dev Patnaik put it in his book) but not reactive. Innovation – truly disruptive innovation that moves entire industries forward and gives our lives new meaning – never happens by just meeting existing customer needs, nor by anticipating unmet customer desires, as the apostles of customer research would like us to believe.
Don Norman, author of The Design of Future Things, among other books, and a long-time advocate of the business value of design, recently shocked his peers by coming to a similar conclusion. In an outburst of self-criticism, he belittles the impact of observational design research (or "ethnographic research") on innovation. In his eyes, design research may propel incremental innovation, but the only true driver of game-changing disruptive innovation remains technology: "Design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs." Design research studies how people live, seeking to unearth unmet needs but Norman insists "Major innovation comes from technologists who have little understanding of all this research stuff: they invent because they are inventors." To support his point he refers to a list of inventions that all occurred without customer research: the airplane, the automobile, the telephone, the radio, the television, the computer, the personal computer, the Internet, text messaging, the cell phone." You might add the iPod and the iPhone, both creations of a company that famously refuses to conduct any customer research. The old Henry Ford line comes to mind ("If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses") and along with it the provocative question: Can customers look beyond their individual needs? Can we rely on them to recognize what's good for society? Can we expect customers to dream up future products and services? Can we even expect them to know (or to show, as design researchers would say) what’s good for them now? Unlike Norman, Roberto Verganti would not categorically say no. A skeptical design thinker, Verganti, in his book Design-driven Innovation, emphasizes the need for "interpreters" (who can be designers but also any other species with an interdisciplinary mind- and skill set) to "radically change the meaning of things."
Both Norman and Verganti herald marketing as a creative discipline. If marketing lives up to its mission – creating innovative products and services and finding meaningful ways to make them valuable for customers and society at large – it needs to be a step ahead of customers. Customer research can inspire and validate but it can never replace the inventiveness and ingenuity of excellent marketing. Only mediocre marketers – those who lack fresh ideas and/or the guts to put them into action – rely heavily on research to back up their decisions. They end up as me-too's and yield good enough results with good enough tools. That's fine. But if you set out to "rethink" marketing, you must shoot a little higher.
The rest of the marketing thinkers do not do much better. In a way, the HBR article is indicative of a lack of vision across the industry. Since Malcom Gladwell's Tipping Point, there has not been one single book exerting comparable influence on the profession. CMOs' by-lined articles in industry trades usually play it safe and state the obvious. The myriad social media consultants who have popped up over the past few years, as well as marketing expert bloggers, boutique agencies, and industry outsiders are all preaching the social marketing gospel to the choir (or to those few remaining on the other side of the "new digital divide") in their publications. Even at conferences such as SXSW, next, the Conversational Marketing Summit, or Marketing 2.0, which are usually ahead of the digital curve, marketing thinkers have been beating a dead horse this year, more or less citing the same set of principles, practices, and case studies. At next09 in Hamburg, Get Satisfaction's Lane Becker, who spoke before me, and I were cracking up when we realized that we were referring to the same case studies in our presentations, the usual marketing 2.0 suspects: Zappos, Skittles, Best Buy, Starbuck's My Idea, Threadless, and so on.
As we are entering the new decade, it appears as if the marketing discipline, after undergoing a mesmerizing major transformation in the past two to three years, is facing stagnation. This often occurs when pioneering concepts are fully absorbed by the mainstream: Social marketing is on the way to becoming THE marketing, as social media is becoming THE media (it is always a sign of broad adoption if adjectives are dropped). Authenticity, engagement, meaning, communities, social, conversations, transparency, etc. – they're all accepted across the industry and widely implemented now. What then is the next frontier for marketers? What will be the next big marketing innovation?
Here's how you do product demos right: Advertising firm BBH has produced a series of videos for the Google Chrome browser, and you have to give them credit for creating such intuitive, almost naive metaphors for a very unemotional 'technocratic' brand. Since Peter Greenaway no one has married math and artistic expression more convincingly. It's truly "A New Way to See the Internet."
From the BBH labs site: "We took Google’s ingenuity & innovation as inspiration in developing the idea for seven short films (& an intro), demonstrating the benefits of Google Chrome. Every creation is built by hand, filmed in camera, with no special effects added. Even the music where Jacqui, the harpist, is playing is live on set. As it should always be with Google, the product is the hero. We celebrate the Chrome product, but we hope in a 'Googley' way."
A full-page ad in USA Today on Friday and in the New York Times today marks the next chapter of the never-ending “the conversation is your brand” saga. Trident, the chewing gum maker, bought the placements, and instead of using them to promote its latest product (Trident Layers) with the usual mix of emotionally resonant narrative, sharp copy, and persuasive imagery, it chose to feature select tweets about the product under the tagline “The people have Tweeted."
Trident says that the ten tweets featured were discovered by the Trident team using Twitter Search, and that they used Twitter to contact each party to secure their approval, but it is hard to suppress the perception of them being fabricated. Notwithstanding the question of whether or not the ad deserves the notion of authenticity, it presents an interesting twist in the democratization of brands. We‘ve seen Skittles (introducing the “Interweb," an aggregation of third-party conversations about Skittles, on its homepage), creative shop Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, social CRM provider Get Satisfaction, or Seth Godin’s Brands in Public embrace real-time web branded conversations – on the web.Trident, however, can now pride itself with being the first brand to apply this principle in a mainstream print ad.
But not only that: The "People have Tweeted” ad mashes up the Trident brand by not so subtly borrowing iconography from other brands. The first thing you notice is that it leads with an oversize “hero shot” of the “naked” gum, staging it like a slickly designed consumer electronics device and making you wonder if this is indeed just a gum or the next, much-awaited Apple product. Moreover, the ad not only features content from Twitter but also somewhat overtly leans on Twitter’s brand, citing recognizable brand elements such as font and colors while downplaying those of Trident (there is no display of a Trident logo whatsoever). It is almost as if Twitter, Apple, and Trident merged and became one super-convergent uber-product – which is, one would suspect, exactly the impression the advertisers aimed for.
Perhaps this ushers in the next era of advertising, one that is fuelled by the paradigms of the social web but applicable across all media: Brands that understand and capitalize on the insight that they’re not only shaped by the conversations of their consumers (fans and followers, that is) but also increasingly by the personas of other brands. Social, in this sense, means not only inviting employees and customers to co-create your brand, but also, openly or discretely, hybridizing, mashing up, or collaborating with other brands.
I attended the Trendforum in Munich last week (frog was a sponsor), a two-day conference that gathered European innovation, marketing, and R&D executives to explore emerging technologies, social trends, and innovative business models. The program was eclectic and the content mostly of high quality. I was particularly intrigued by the opening session that intersected macro-economic forecasting with geeky trend evangelism as well as a humanistic pledge for meaning-driven business (in fact, the other sessions didn’t even come close, including special guest Ray Kurzweil, whose remote keynote, given by way of 3D-holographic projection, remained utterly flat).
As the first speaker, Dr. Markku Wilenius, Senior Vice President, Economic Research and Corporate Development with Allianz SE, set the framework by introducing overarching future themes, key challenges facing mankind, from climate change to water scarcity to demographic developments. Forecasting the economic development over the next two decades, he predicted redefined notions and metrics of both societal progress and individual success, and heralded “true value accounting” that would ultimately “decouple consumption from growth.” In ten years, he argued, easy and seamless sustainable choices would have become the norm, as would have “smarter systems.” Wilenius identified four key consumer trends, all to be filed under Consumer Empowerment: Downshifting (simplicity -> value for money, price sensitivity, discounts); Transparency (clarity -> open communicatons, clear essence); Selfness (control -> self-governance, tangibility); and Age of Less (substance -> long-term thinking, lightness). Despite the daunting challenges in these times of crisis, his outlook remained optimistic: “Material scarcity always creates an abundance of ideas.” If that is true, we can look forward to innovative times in which creativity will not only become a crucial skill but an existential means of survival.
Dr. Christine Woesler de Panafieu, founder of CoSight, an international trend research and marketing consulting firm in Paris, picked up the ball and described how the macro-trends Wilenius had pinpointed would alter the lives of consumers. She argued that we were moving from "post- to ultra-modernity," resulting in a renaissance of the renaissance: “the man as measure of all things.” This neo-humanistic mindset would bear a new spiritual quest – “an individual, open path seeking direct resonance with the sacred,” as she put it. The number of pilgrimages is indeed on the rise, as is the number of new religions (and meta-religions such as the recent Charter of Compassion or the portal Beliefnet). “The 21st century will be spiritual or it won’t be at all,” Dr. Woesler de Panafieu quoted a French philosopher. Morality is in high demand, but doing good is shifting from convention to conviction, from a humanitarian to an empowerment approach. For brands, this means they need to become the “right thing to do.” And one only has to look as far as Foursquare to see that converting social currency into real value will the business model of the future.
Nils Müller, founder and CEO of TrendONE, a trend research firm, finally took the audience on a riveting tour de force through much buzzed-about emerging tech trends, envisioning the future in 2020 as a seamless blend between the real and virtual worlds, dominated by location-based, real-time, and social computing applications that turn the Internet into an "Outernet" and “every interface into a surface” – from printed electronics to face recognition to augmented social shopping. He depicted an evolution from “lean back” to “move forward” to “jump in” to “always-on” to “plug in” media. And he showed tons of videos: the "Siftables" - see picture above; the inevitable Microsoft Natal clip; a demo of brainwave-based voiceless communications (theaudeo.com), and a clip on augmented vision enabled by eye chips (tat.se). Their common thread: Technology in disguise, with front-ends that are becoming touchable, intuitive, and human-centric. Mueller coined the term “Shytech” for this phenomenon: technology that can afford to be non-intrusive because it is fully immersive.
In the concluding panel discussion, Dr. Woesler de Panafieu was asked what’s left to do for designers when everything was immersive and one great computing cloud. “Designers’ task will be to make the invisible visible,” she said, “creating the new interaction codes of our societies.” That again alluded to the big mega-trend of Good Computing – without Computers. Designers are the ones who can translate data (and meta-data) into meaning and make morality tangible amidst a flood of information. As they visualize the dematerialization of products and services, how long will it take before the dematerialized world becomes the ideal one?
Meaningful Marketing is all about context. Hitting consumers when it matters, promoting product value (for purchase) by adding experience value immediately (for free). Here's a great example:
I just read a remarkable essay by Venkatesh Rao on “marketing, innovation, and the creation of customers.” It nails the complex relationship between the two functions, examining both similarities and polarities.
Rao opens with what is perhaps the most popular aphorism by venerable management philosopher Peter Drucker:
“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.”
Building upon this, Rao argues that “Marketing and innovation define each other in yin-yang ways,” and that they have in common “a love/hate relationship with a downstream partner function (production and sales respectively) that deals in scale and repetition. One design, a production run of a thousand. One user-story, a thousand registered users. One advertisement, a thousand sales calls. Even in the age of mass customization, you can always tell the two sides apart. Production and sales are always repeating something. (…) Marketing and innovation, on the other hand, depend on novelty and uniqueness to add value. This is necessary. If innovation and marketing did not create repetition opportunities downstream, you would not have a business. You’d have a one-off project.”
For Rao, the “customer isn’t a human being.” Neither is he always right, as some like to claim. User-centered designers and innovators in particular won’t like to hear this, but Rao is certain: “Repeat after me: A customer is a novel and stable pattern of human behavior.” Rao’s conclusion is convincing: “Customers need to be created (…) Innovation isn’t about creating novel products or services. An innovation is a stimulus that causes a novel and stable pattern of human behavior to emerge.” As an example, he cites Google, which he considers “a stimulus that creates a novel pattern of information-discovery behavior known as ‘Googling’ that is different from what ‘searching’ used to be before Google.”
And further: “This is why marketing and innovation are deeply linked in a yin-yang pattern. They are both exploring the same uncertainties in free human behavior, and seeking ways to stabilize it into predictable patterns. When both look at uncertainties in human behavior, or uncertainties in potential stimuli, you get similarities and harmonies. When they are looking in different directions (typically, marketing looking at the customer, while innovation is looking at the stimulus), you get polarities. This tension is necessary. If ever innovation became truly “’customer-led’ you’ll be in a universe of faster horses. If ever marketing becomes truly ‘product-led,’ you’ll be in a universe of stuff nobody will buy.”
It is the same point Roberto Verganti makes when he rejects the value of market and consumer research and instead touts “design-driven innovation” as a way to “radically innovate the meaning of products.” Verganti claims that for truly breakthrough products and services, one must look beyond customers and users to those he calls “interpreters” – the experts who see and grasp the unique but repeatable “stimuli that cause a novel and stable pattern of human behavior to emerge” (in Rao’s words). Instead of being user-driven and product-centric, both marketing and innovation begin and end with meaning, and they’re both tasked with its production. It is a creative act, an art not a science, and a story not a process.
Reading the business section of the New York Times today, you can’t help but notice the juxtaposition of two seemingly different companies, which, at second glance, have more in common that you might think. One is Bloomberg, the financial data juggernaut that has enough cash to aspire to become “the world’s most influential news organization.” The company has placed its bets on the acquisition of the venerable BusinessWeek, trusting that it will broaden its reach into a mainstream business audience. A few pages later, Digital Domain columnist Randall Stross reveals Apple’s pending patent application for a new advertising pop-up technology that forces users of devices and web sites to acknowledge the reception of the commercial message.
What Apple calls “enforcement routine” is basically a radical ad-based model that offers consumers to use Apple’s products and services for free or at a discount if they “watch ads they may not want to watch.” Stross writes: “Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad – it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.” As Stross points out, other brands went down this path before and utterly failed, and he is stunned that Apple, if it is serious about this technology, seems to be willing to risk its reputation of consumer-friendly “cool.”
One story can be read in the context of the other: Bloomberg and Apple not only share a zealously rigid culture and a “walled garden” business model based on selling high-grade packages at a premium price; they are also both media companies. Both have strong communities driven by the Three C’s of Communities – connectivity, content, and context – and both are wondering which of these parameters they can exploit more aggressively without jeopardizing the integrity of the community that is the foundation of their business. Both Apple and Blooomberg create value by heavily relying on network effects within an ecosystem that they tightly control. Both are distributing content to raise demand for their products. And both have a strong brand to extend – and to lose.
With the acquisition of BusinessWeek, Bloomberg’s strategic trajectory is clear: Owning a proprietary technology platform (it sold 300,000 terminals to date), the company is looking for ways to reach more potential buyers (and sell premium services). Apple’s “terminals,” on the other hand, are its iTunes store and its user interfaces, and the recent patent application indicates that the company might explore the exploitation of attention generated through these properties. Bloomberg is buying attention to open up new sources of revenue, Apple might be selling it.
The two brands have one last trait in common: They are not really embracing social media, to put it mildly. Apple, as a company, does not engage, and Bloomberg even discourages its employees to engage. Apple and Bloomberg, in some ways, are the antidotes to a marketplace that – propelled by the forces of the Social Web – is becoming increasingly atomized, hyper-distributed, open, and transparent. Secrecy, compliance, top-down hierarchies, rigid communication policies, and walled gardens are characteristics that may be somewhat outdated in this era, and yet they seem to be the very cornerstones of Apple’s and Bloomberg’s success as the two firms thrive as the surprise champions of their respective categories. Both came to save ailing industries, ripe for innovation: Apple reinvented the music industry and dominates the Smart Phone market. Bloomberg is determined to reinvent the news business. But in the long term, can Apple sustain its community of users without becoming a more transparent organization? And can Bloomberg really emerge as “the world’s most influential news organization” without going social?
If you only see one slide show about the State of the Internet in 2009, "Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)" by David Gillespie, an Account Director at Maclaren McCann, Toronto, is a good choice: a mesmerizing 256 slide manifesto on the Intention Economy with Data (as the bank) and Meaning (as the currency).
What a season finale it was. ‘Shut the Door. Have a Seat’ was a “tight balance of emotionally pungent drama and company coup d’etat,” the LA Times wrote. And indeed, Mad Men came through in the end. And all the mad men and women came through: Sterling, Cooper, Pryce, Pete, Peggy, Joan, and, more than anyone else of course, Don Draper.
He took Conrad Hiltons’s advice to heart and instead of “crying and relying on other people’s moves” he became the master of his fortune and finally did something meaningful. You could see the glow in his eyes, the pride, and the deep satisfaction of someone who has found (or accepted) his calling. “So you like being in advertising after all?” Sterling asked (a rhetorical question). Facing a divorce from his wife and separation from his kids, Draper, for the first time, gained the stature of a man who has a moral compass. With faith both in himself and in others, the boss turned into a leader.
The final scene with the new agency crew gathered in the makeshift hotel room office poignantly displayed that Draper’s evolution mirrored the dramatic changes a whole society was undergoing at the time: Gender equality, democratization of ideas, flat(ter) hierarchies, and employee empowerment, and an angst, underlying all this progress, triggered by JFK’s assassination. “People used to buy things. Then something terrible happened. And people changed. They want different things now. No one really knows how everything’s changed. But you do,” Draper says in his pitch to Peggy, as he’s trying to convince her to join the new venture rising out of the ashes of the firm formerly known as Sterling Cooper. Although set against the backdrop of the early sixties, the Mad Men finale could be read as commentary on the current cultural climate. Times are as transformative as they were back then. The sentiment is equally nervous, and after 9/11 and the Great Recession people are looking for new meaning in a post-materialistic and, sorry Don, post-advertising world.
And yet, Mad Men’s finale represented both swan song and rebirth of an industry. It may be very American to consider every crisis an opportunity, and in this sense, the end of Mad Men season III was a genuinely American happy ending, or better, an ending with the happiest possible departure – the beginning of a whole new story.Peggy, the empathizer and Pete, the innovator, both had tears in their eyes when they were asked to join the new firm, because, at last, they were given the recognition they deserved, and the opportunity to “build something.” Happiness lies in its pursuit, as we all know, and the Mad Men finale reminded us of a great national pastime: If we throw all our talent and passion together, we can build something great. It can be an advertising firm, a movement, or an entire nation.
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