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Chief Meaning Officer: Valuing the Immeasurable

 The following is a slide-by-slide transcript of my short talk at DLD Tel Aviv last week (October 23, 2012).

1

Isn’t it ironic? We live in the age of hyper-connectivity, but business seems to be more disconnected than ever from the people it serves. According to a recent survey, some 27% of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm. However, in the same survey only 4% of employees agreed.

2

Employees and consumers feel increasingly disenfranchised. Trust in brands and institutions are at all all-time low. Moreover, there is a growing sentiment that the “market society” is invading and commercializing all aspects of our lives, and secularizing even those spaces that we once considered sacred.

3

This identity crisis of capitalism has raised some fundamental issues about the role of business in society. Is it time to measure what really matters? Many leading business thinkers believe so and propose new definitions of value. One of them is happiness. Bhutan introduced the Gross National Happiness Index. The United Nations issued a Happiness resolution. And next Spring the world’s first ever Happathon will take place in NYC.

4

But perhaps. rather than measuring a different kind of value, we ought to start valuing what is not measurable. What if markets were indeed sympathetic communities for social exchange, as this quote by the economist Robert Solomon suggests?

5

What if it were business’ primary responsibility to make meaning, not money?

6

I believe that it is no longer sufficient to be efficient or excellent – today's companies need to be significant to attract and retain talent and customers. They need to embrace “meaning” as the new currency. Their leaders need to become curators and producers of meaning: Chief Meaning Officers. But how exactly do you produce meaning? What makes an experience, a brand meaningful?

7

I would argue that meaning is constituted by three pillars: Scarcity, communality, transcendence. An event, an experience is meaningful when it is unique, deviates from the norm, the routine, when it is a disruption, or simply exclusive. It is meaningful when it can be experienced or shared with others, when it creates a sense of belonging and community. And lastly, something is meaningful when it elevates the people involved, when it points to a collective vision, a purpose greater than the action or transaction itself. This is the element of transcendence. Let’s look at some examples.

8

The travel service Nextpedition turns the trip into a game, with surprising twists and turns along the way. The service does not tell the traveler where she is going until the last minute. This is interesting. Traditional business wisdom holds that trust is earned by predictable behavior. But when everything is consistent and standardized, how do you create meaningful experiences? Nextpedition’s answer is serendipity. Serendipity is scarce and thus meaningful. Unpredictability is the new consistency.

9

Collaborative Consumption business models combine all three principles of meaning production. Let’s take Airbnb as example: Renting your apartment to complete strangers definitely represents a disruption that unleashes the forces of controlled serendipity.  But it also capitalizes on and fosters social capital inherent in dormant, trust-based networks and humanizes and personalizes travel And collaborative consumption services make all parties feel they are serving a greater purpose, in this case, sustainability, saving natural resources.

10

The musician Beck released his new album exclusively as “sheets of music” without recording any of the new songs himself. Instead, Beck invited his community to record them and share them online. By doing so, he created artificial scarcity: Beck’s own performances of his songs would remain exclusive to concertgoers. He literally redefined what the value of music means in the digital age. Scarcity, communality, transcendence.

11

In a somewhat radical stance against consumerism, outdoor clothier Patagonia placed a “Don’t Buy This Jacket” advertisement during the peak of shopping season. Patagonia may have jeopardized short-term sales – but instead built long-term loyalty and a customer community based on shared values.

12

Catalan football club FC Barcelona prides itself with the motto “More than a club.” Its values of fairness, freedom, and human rights are shared as universal values by supporters all over the world. The club has become a symbol of the beautiful game. It embodies that sometimes losing in style can be more rewarding than winning by all means.

13

This brings us to art. If we want business to be more human, then it is time for the humanities to design our businesses. It is time to find a place for mystery and delight in business. It is time for management not to be a science, but an art.

14

This, by the way, also spurs innovation. Innovation means changing the meaning of things. That’s what art does. Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are like artists, too. As the author Kathryn Schultz puts it, they are always initially wrong, by empirical measures. They “see the world as it is not,” but could be. In other words: they have a vision. They are the fools who speak the truth, have “insane” ideas, and make change happen. They are the Chief Meaning Officers. We need more of them.

On TED.com: “3 Ways To (Usefully Lose) Control Of Your Brand”

I am super-thrilled that my TED University talk from this year’s TED Global conference that took place in Edinburgh in June made it onto the TED.com homepage this morning. It’s very flattering and, like being on the actual TED stage in person, also a bit nerve-wrecking.

Titled “3 Ways To (Usefully Lose) Control Of Your Brand,” the 6-minute talk explores – as much as that is possible in such short amount of time – how companies can respond to evermore demanding customers and employees who are empowered by hyper-connectivity and the ‘radical transparency’ of social media. Popular belief holds that commitment is fickle, reputation volatile, and loyalty scarce. In short: Companies have lost control – over their workforce, their customers, and as a result, their brands.

But have they really? In my talk, I argue that companies have never been in control, and that they actually have more control over the loss of control than ever before – in fact, they can design for the loss of control…

Also see this great summary on the TED Blog.

...and a related, longer article on design mind (republished by Rotman Magazine)

...as well as a brief reflection on my experience at TEDGlobal…

The Future Is Not What It Used to Be: Predictions for 2011 to 2050, Already Obsolete

It’s that time of the year again. The trend augurs are releasing their predictions for the coming year. Except for the analyst firm Gartner, that is, which already shared its "Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011" in October this year – we shall see if the first-mover advantage will make them more accurate. The best forecast might still be the agenda for Davos, simply because many of the participants have the power to actually make the future happen.

Michael Schrage does not, but he is a keen observer. His “Top Six Innovation Ideas of 2011” set the theme for the whole bunch: since radical events of the 'black swan' kind are understandably hard to predict, professional future gazers usually focus on highlighting existing trends and their continued yet amplified impact in the new year. Another typical feature of trend lists is the excessive use of neologisms, preferably in the form of the noun-ification (oops) of nouns which untreated would sound all too common. Schrage, for example, coins the term “contestification” (“contests”? – nah!). Apart from that though, his list is interesting and sound: he cites touch screen user experiences (“having the right touch to get the right touch will become a desirable communications competence”); “WWWabs” (“not-quite-ready-for-prime-time alpha and beta versions of apps to explore and test”) as valuable playgrounds for companies as they shift from “R&D” to what Schrage calls “E&S - Experiment & Scale;” the rise of promotional platforms (“advertising will take a backseat to promotional offers as retailers and brand managers alike collectively decide that branding a promotion matters just as much as promoting a brand”); the “gameification” (here, he did it again!) of business (“the companies that succeed in gameifying their products, services, and brands will enjoy a certain Zynga in their step”); and the renaissance of lobbyism (“a charismatically innovative lobbyist may have a bigger impact on marketplace success in 2011 than the country's most savvy technologist or marketer”).

TechCrunch’s Erich Schonefeld seems to have looked into the same crystal ball as Schrage. He, too, argues that 2011 might be the year when “touch becomes central to the computing experience.” And in his tete-a-tete with writer and blogger Andrew Keen he addresses head on the warnings of pessimists like VC investor Fred Wilson who contend that irrational exuberance will inevitably lead to another crash: "Will 2011 Be 1999 All Over Again?"

Even further back to the future goes Alvin Toffler, the grandfather of futurology, who is not content with foresights for just the next year; he predicts “40 for the Next 40” – trends that will shape our world from now to 2050. It has been 40 years since he popularized terms such as “knowledge age,” “power shift,” “digital revolution,” or “information overload” in his landmark book Future Shock, all of which are now part of the mainstream lexicon. That alone should make you curious, but the outlook released this week by Toffler Associates is a bit of a letdown. Toffler still has an apparent knack for condensing disparate phenomena into succinct assertions, but none of his predictions are really surprising (just some examples: the growing geo-political power of ‘philanthro-capitalists' who eclipse national and multi-national organizations in influence on many global issues; a growing number of women in leadership positions; religious groups pushing to get into governments around the world; the continued rise of “open, collaborative innovation paradigms;” mass production that is increasingly replaced with on-demand, custom manufacturing of products and services, etc.).

But maybe that’s not the point. If “the future is already here, just unevenly distributed,” as William Gibson famously stated, then the futurologist’s task might indeed just be to collate various dispersed pieces and even out the distribution by elevating the predictable to the status of meta. Foreseeing the future is like innovation: a new application for an existing invention. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The most interesting example for this approach is one of the more provocative predictions in Toffler Associates’ report. Coining the term "obsoledge" (yep, another neologism, but more inventive than Schrage's), the group refers to knowledge's increasingly extremely limited shelf life and stresses that every chunk of knowledge will eventually become obsolete. Applied to Toffler’s own foresights, this means of course that everything we now purport to know about the future may not be necessarily wrong, but it may not matter anymore when the future arrives. In light of accelerated technology cycles, as well as economic and political shifts that will be as sudden as they are drastic, it might become more difficult for us to catch up with the future. In this sense, perhaps the next true “Future Shock” will be that in 40 years from now none of Toffler’s predictions will have become part of our cultural fabric, and we may not even recall any of them. In the best and worst possible cases, the future will finally be what it has always been – fully beyond our imagination.

[photo: Per Forsberg]

Disrupt and Disrupted - Notes from The Great Indian B2B Marketing Summit

I had the great pleasure of speaking at The Great Indian B2B Marketing Summit in Bangalore yesterday, organized by Jessie Paul, the former CMO of Indian outsourcing juggernaut Wipro, author of the book “No Money Marketing,” and founder of Paul Writer, a marketing consultancy cum hub that runs an influential online CMO Roundtable and other formidable programs to facilitate the exchange amongst the Indian marketing community. The program was quite an eclectic mix of topics, ranging from social media and digital marketing trends, to market development, to marketing leadership, to personal branding.

The two latter topics appeared to be the most popular, based on the audience’s response. Jessie herself provided a good overview of the main tenets of personal branding, and her session was a great reminder of the importance of creating a “personal brand map” to identify (following models by Geert Hofstede and Jim Collins) one’s “values, heroes, symbols, and rituals,” and derive one’s unique brand promise at the intersection of “passion, excellence, and profitability.” In addition to establishing personal thought leadership platforms tailored to the respective career level (entry-level execs may want to focus on processes, best practices, and creation; mid-level execs on opinions, forward-looking statements, HR issues, and organizational vision; whereas CXO execs typically address industry frameworks as well as macro-economic and policy issues), Rajeev Suri, CEO of Liqwid Krystal, offered some helpful advice for aspiring marketing leaders: 1. Stay close to the leadership; 2. Stay close to the money; 3. Never get into cruise control.

None of those are easy, and I can certainly empathize with Sangeeta Sundaram, head of marketing and communications at Capgemini India, who remarked that “marketing is notoriously over-stretched and under-resourced.” But then again, as Kiran Mani, head of industry sales for Google India, pointed out in his presentation: “Effective marketing does not have to cost much.” Jessie, with her penchant for “No Money Marketing," would agree, and ad agency executive Jon Bond goes even one step further, as quoted in a recent Fast Company article: "Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it."

While that is a perfectly viral line from a Twitter and SEO viewpoint and might cheer up some CMOs in light of dwindling marketing budgets, it of course posits an existential threat for advertisers and other marketing services firms. "Creating more work for less money is the big paradox," says Matt Howell, president of the Boston agency Modernista, in the same Fast Company piece that depicted a rather gloomy scenario for today’s Mad Men (“Mayhem on Madison Avenue”). Both client and agency side are facing a more and more strenuous battle for attention and engagement in the light of fragmented media usage, always-on connectivity, and social media: "The irony is that while there have never been more ways to reach consumers, it's never been harder to connect with consumers," explains Brad Jakeman, now chief creative officer at Activision, the gaming company.

No wonder new models are popping up left and right. Forrester calls for “Adaptive Marketing,” and the Harvard Business Review (HBR) recently ran a comprehensive report on “Social Media and the New Rules of Branding." In one of the report’s articles, McKinsey’s David C. Edelman suggests that marketers need to respond to today’s more nuanced customer journeys. Far from systematically narrowing their choices, Edelman argues, today’s consumers take a much more iterative journey of the three traditional customer journey stages: consider, evaluate, buy, and spend more time in the additional stages of enjoy, advocate, and bond. Edelman’s main revelation: If the bond becomes strong enough, consumers enter an enjoy-advocate-buy loop that skips the consider and evaluate stages entirely.

That all makes sense, but it strikes me as unlikely that tomorrow’s marketing innovation will come from reading a McKinsey piece in HBR. These days, domain expertise ages quickly, and doing is replacing saying. Marketers increasingly have to develop added-value ancillary products, services, and apps in order to sell their core offering. Traditional marketing is disrupted by disruptive marketing, which itself is disrupting interruptive advertising. Yet - in the best tradition of Clayton Christensen’s “innovation dilemma" - yesterday’s win can become tomorrow’s burden as disruptive viral campaigns are quickly absorbed by an army of me-too’s. Benchmarking, best practices, and new theoretical frameworks often just eclipse a lack of imagination, a lack of customer empathy, and a lack of courage to be creative: “There is no one to copy, no one to follow,” says Richard Branson.

And yet here I was at a marketing conference sharing my own playbook. Jessie had invited me to present on “What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Design-Driven Innovation for B2B,” and I definitely enjoyed my role as the somewhat eccentric outlier in the line-up. I was surprised how many people in the audience knew frog when I conducted a mini brand audit at the outset of my presentation, and I was flattered by their interest in frog. I took the attendees through a quick overview of frog’s history, philosophy, and approach, before elaborating on the seven design principles that I thought might be applicable for B2B marketers. The subsequent Q&A yielded some incisive questions, although, as usual, I wasn’t able to answer the “ROI of design” one satisfactorily. If anyone can, drop me a note. Oh well. Sometimes you just need to believe (or have a stellar sales team).

Here are the slides from my presentation:

What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Design-Driven Innovation

 

 

 

Old Spice and the Return of Ad-Power: Are "Transformats" the Future of Marketing?

Silver Fish Hand Catch! As the social web’s echo chamber is gushing about Wieden+Kennedy (W+K)’s masterful Old Spice campaign (actor and former football star Isaiah Mustafa wowing viewers with his smooth-talking delivery in video replies to hundreds of online queries or comments tweeted to him by web users), first spoofs are manifesting its pop-cultural credentials, and the meta-story is increasingly becoming the story ("how did they do it?"), both practical and philosophical questions arise. The jury is still out on the campaign’s commercial impact (various news sites and blogs are reporting that sales have fallen by 7%, which various other news sites and blogs dispute). I’m more interested in the campaign as a cultural phenomenon and its lasting implications: Is it a one-off nifty idea or are we witnessing the emergence of something bigger than that, a whole new paradigm for marketers and content producers, as Mashable claims?

Without a doubt, several things are remarkable about the Old Spice campaign. First of all, the numbers: A total of 183 individual video responses have been posted to the Old Spice YouTube channel, and to date the videos have attracted more than 38 million individual views. During the campaign, the Old Spice channel was the most viewed channel on YouTube, and it is now the third most subscribed channel ever on the site’s “sponsor” category. Total upload views for the channel, a metric that includes the original TV ads, currently stand at over 92 million. The final video reply, addressed to “everyone,” has amassed 3.3 million views and over 20,000 comments alone. As of today, the brand’s official Twitter account has grown to 92,000 followers.

Secondly, the campaign has exposed a key ingredient of viral content - disruption, in the form of a classic “What If” proposition that challenges conventional views: What if the main character of a commercial suddenly takes on a life on its own and starts directly responding to viewers?

Thirdly, Old Spice has probably been the first campaign to be both hyper-individualized (Mustafa's individual replies to Twitter users) and hyper-social (spreading virally as people have forwarded and embedded the replies). In fact, the very personalization of the responses has made them so unique and worth sharing. And all of that at hyper-speed: Seldom before has an advertising campaign produced so many highly personalized pieces of content in such short amount of time.

Lastly, the campaign has beamed us back into an age of Mad Men superpower, perfectly coinciding with the imminent launch of the new season of our favorite TV series this weekend. Ironically, though, rather than by relying on traditional persuasive ad-power Mad Men’s clout has been restored by an ad agency using social media of all things. Or, to be more precise: Transmedia. After already toying with them for their 2008 “Somebody Else’s Phone” campaign for Nokia, W+K borrowed the principles of Transmedia again for Old Spice – but this time augmenting them to much more visible effect.

Consider Transmedia a variation of social media. The term is commonly attributed to Marsha Kinder, who premiered it in her 1991 book Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Communication scholar Henry Jenkins (author of Convergence Culture, formerly at MIT, now with the Annenberg School in L.A.) then made it popular by crafting a theory of “Transmedia Storytelling” in a Technology Review essay, depicting it as a cross-platform narrative where each platform adds something meaningful to the fictional world – whether it’s more back story, deeper stories for secondary characters, the interactive dimension of a game, or new opportunities for the fans to participate in telling the story. More specifically, Jenkins laid out the “Seven Core Concepts of Transmedia Storytelling”: Spreadability vs. Drillability, Continuity vs. Multiplicity, Immersion vs. Extractability, Worldbuilding, Seriality, Subjectivity, and Performance.

Over the past ten years or so, Transmedia has again and again been considered the “next big thing” without ever really breaking through into mainstream. Battlestar Galactica, the Batman series, or The Matrix were sporadic examples of innovative Transmedia entertainment plays, but only as of late, the proliferation of games, social media, and mobile platforms has given rise to a more widespread adoption of the concept.

Transmedia is now increasingly popular for content producers who are facing economic pressures to maximize their assets across platforms. The NBC series Heroes is often cited as a watershed moment, and Tim Kring, its creator, is widely seen as the man who made Transmedia plausible for a mass TV audience. Kring is also one of the forces behind Conspiracy for Good, a large-scale cross-platform movement that attempts to use Transmedia to support social causes – Lina Srivastava calls this “Transmedia Activism.” At the heart of the Conspiracy for Good experience is a locative event over the course of three weeks in London, starting in mid-July and running until August 7th. Another recent example of Transmedia Storytelling is the comic franchise The 99, Naif Al-Mutawa’s vision of Muslim superheroes that he has extended to multiple media formats. Moreover, Wired UK recently hired agency Six to turn its latest issue – featuring a cover story on Transmedia – into a transmedia Alternate Reality Game (ARG). There are even some who call the iPad “the world’s first transmedia device” – a questionable notion given the rather retro lean-back mode of consumption that the iPad encourages.

Before this backdrop, the Old Spice campaign is arguably the most comprehensive use of Transmedia in an advertising context to date, and it serves as the blue print for what I call “transformats.” I would pinpoint their three main characteristics as follows:

- Transmedia: Transformats use a multi-modular presentation of narratives that extends the story across various media and allows a social web-enabled “audience formerly known as the audience” to participate in the story development. In the case of Old Spice, it went full circle: from YouTube to Twitter and back.

- Transcendent: Transformats transcend not only the original medium but also the original story, creating new meaning beyond the conceived plot. In the case of Old Spice, the main protagonist was given a life on its own and the power to directly interact with members of the audience. Thus, the story became an open-ended conversation, and the initial message faded amidst a chorus of issues (user-)generated by the cultural fabric of the social web.

- Transformative: Transformats advance marketing best practices and lift the state-of-the-art. Key here is that the design of the marketing program itself is the story (see meta-marketing), or at least an integral part of it. Case in point: The majority of coverage on the Old Spice campaign heralded its innovative quality, and many stories were background stories that shed light on “the making of.” Perhaps that’s the most powerful thing about innovation, from a marketing perspective: True innovation always is a story in and of itself.

Transformats may indeed constitute a whole new framework for state-of-the-art marketing. They may span even more media (TV, social web, movies, radio, print, AR, etc.), zig-zag more artfully between virtual and real world, and incorporate more gaming mechanics that incentivize users through “achievements” modeled on behavioral economics. Besides advertising, transformats may also have a place in media outlets: Imagine direct video responses from reporters to readers’ comments or interactive maps that enrich stories by pulling in user-generated real-time data and commentary, as a hybrid of professional and citizen journalism. Or reporters who post their intent to run a story and publicly ask for input and feedback (a moderated WikiLeaks, if you will, where readers can follow the genesis of a story). Or articles that readers can “park” after the morning read of their print newspaper, just to pick them up in the evening on their TV screen (as envisioned here by the NYTimes R&D lab). All of this would make the newsroom of the future a social media-savvy, super-convergent, real-time multimedia production studio, with the release cycles of stories shrunk to almost zero, and various media and engagement modes extending their life cycles to X.

It doesn’t require too much imagination to see transformats also play a seminal role in transforming education, healthcare, civil society, and even politics. Already, Gwynne Kostin, director of new media and citizen engagement at the General Services Administration, examines on GovLoop how to “adopt ‘Old Spice’ success to government” by embracing what she extrapolates as the campaign’s main tenets “speed, planning, talent, and trust.” While this ambition appears to be perhaps a bit of a stretch at this point, the overarching trajectory is evident: In an economy where attention is as scarce as commitment to action, stories that transcend their original storyline, set new standards for their genre, and engage people across various media can make a difference. As the complexity of our societal challenges is increasing, our solutions are becoming more open-ended. In other words: To tackle X-problems, you need to have X-conversations. Old Spice was just the beginning.

Edelman's Six Digital Trends to Watch

From “marketing in the age of streams” to the “Googlization of media” to “situational awareness” to “location, location, locaton” to “business becomes social” to “private becomes public” – in their latest report, Edelman’s digital mavens Steve Rubel and David Armano provide a solid overview of the six key digital trends to watch.

Six Digital Trends To Watch by Steve Rubel and David Armano

 

Chief Meaning Officer on Sparkcast

I was interviewed by Rogier Bikker for Sparkcast, the podcast of Dutch branding agency Energize, on my “Chief Meaning Officer” concept.

You can listen to it here (sorry about the rambling….the session was recorded in Shanghai during my last, very intense China trip, and I think I was rather tired...)

http://energize.nl/sparkcast.php

http://www.marketingfacts.nl/ (scroll down till you see the Energize logo in the sidebar)

And in the iTunes music store under ‘Sparkcast.’

Don’t Interrupt, Disrupt! How to Be Viral Without Viral Marketing

As we’re inundated with hero shots of the iPad every day, on every billboard and the back of every magazine cover, it appears to be a good time to rethink the relationship between advertising and product, between marketing and innovation. It’s not that Apple doesn’t spend any money on advertising – no, it was pouring a whopping $500 million into its launch campaign for the iPad. But what is different is that Apple’s marketing doesn’t have to be clever or utterly creative. In fact, it is stunningly not so. No major social media campaign needed to be sparked, no user-generated content contest needed to be held. And while the ongoing tongue-in-cheek anti-Microsoft ads are undeniably cute, they are not really an advertising revelation. Gone are the days of the bold “1984” campaigns. Today, Apple has earned enough attention to forgo any ostentatious marketing, in fact, so much that a cleverly orchestrated campaign would distract from the brand rather than boosting it. The company simply displays its products – that’s all it takes. Apple’s products are viral without any viral marketing.

Viral and ‘spreadable’

Before digging more into this, let’s pause for a moment to examine the term ‘viral,’ which has come under scrutiny recently, not for the first time but more critically, since transmedia augur Henry Jenkins, in ever-so-dramatic fashion, “declared war on viral media.” Jenkins wrote: “Until marketers understand the consumer's active agency and the social mechanisms shaping their circulation of content, they are doomed to insult and alienate the very people they are hoping to attract.” Jenkins suggests we replace ‘viral media’ – and, by extension, ‘viral marketing’ as the discipline that produces ‘viral media’ – with the new term ‘spreadable,’ arguing that this would more accurately reflect the consumer’s agency and the dynamics of content-sharing. Fair enough, yet Jenkins, in his academic fervor, underestimates practitioners. They know the social mechanisms of sharing all too well and are perfectly capable of distinguishing between the built-in contagious distribution of a product and the spreading of cultural memes as content that accumulates meaning as it is passed on. They are not one and the same, but innovative marketers use both notions and the outcome is similar, which is why, for the sake of simplicity, I will stick with the catch-all ‘viral’ in this post.

Advocacy and amplification

But back to Apple and the relationship between product and marketing innovation. At the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris this spring, I had the pleasure of hearing Steve Knox from Tremor, Procter & Gamble’s word-of-mouth marketing arm, illustrate the underlying cognitive principles of viral marketing. In his view, there are two dimensions that matter: advocacy and amplification. If you have a strong brand advocate (a passionate user) but lack the appropriate channels to amplify his/her evangelism, you won’t have much of a viral effect. You are stuck with early adopters, derived from sociologist Everett Rogers’s “diffusion of innovations” theory and so perfectly portrayed by Rob Walker in his New York Times Magazine column, but without critical mass they will not convert into mainstream success. On the other hand, if you muster strong amplification, yet for a product without vocal advocates, you will fall into the over-amplification trap: Awareness of the product will quickly dissipate or, worse, the over-exposure might backfire and inadvertently shed light on the product’s flaws as the gap between visibility and user advocacy will create a suspicious gap just waiting for the blood-sucking blogosphere to be exploited. Simply put: If you generate a lot of talk, but there’s nothing to really talk about, you may end up with a lot of chatter, but no true social conversation – and thus no viral, no networked distribution.

Disruption and transcendence

So what makes a product worth talking about? Fox’s theory is intriguing: he points to two main principles of viral effects that emulate cognitive models. First, the product needs to disrupt a cognitive schema, a mental model that the mind produces to consolidate divergent information into one convergent worldview. We’re lazy and fearful creatures, easily intimidated and overwhelmed, so cognitive schemata help us make sense of the world around us by simplifying it into templates. They allow us to take shortcuts in interpreting a vast amount of information. Here’s an example: A plane in the air matches our mental model of a plane but a plane on the Hudson River presents a stark violation to our cognitive schema of a plane. It will therefore create much more attention than the routine plane picture we’re used to. It is – in other words – disruptive.

As these mental models keep us sane, it goes without saying that any truly disruptive innovation will often prompt a “This is crazy!” response. “This is crazy,” as in “This disrupts my cognitive schema.” An instant messaging service – that’s familiar. An instant messaging service that only allows up to 140 characters? That’s crazy. Paying credit card bills online. Nice and convenient. Sharing one’s credit card history with others in public? Crazy! An audio player you can walk with? Crazy! Why would you do that? Because you can. Because it’s different. Because it’s unexpected. Because it’s disruptive – and exactly what Roberto Verganti meant by describing innovation as “radically changing the meaning of things.” Steve Knox would call it “radically disrupting the cognitive equilibrium.” The surplus is (new) meaning.

Now, granted, this kind of cognitive schema violation has always been the hallmark of effective advertising: tearing objects out of context, deconstructing their original meaning and giving them a new one, breaching expectations, etc. However, the difference is that advertising does it after the fact, after the product is made or hit the market. Advertising must interrupt to disrupt, and it usually comes too late, when it is only needed as a cover-up for the lack for a truly disruptive product idea. Jeff Jarvis boiled it down to the stinging claim: “Advertising means product failure.”

The second principle of a viral effect is to take two existing cognitive schemata and combine them into a third, transcendent notion. The iPhone, for example, blended the mental models “mobile phone” and “computer.” The iPad blends “book reader” and “computer.” Or take Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian entertainment company, self-described as a “dramatic mix of circus arts and street entertainment” – a blend of Vegas and traditional circus. Or Starbucks: a blend of fast-food shop and community hang-out (or, on a higher level, an amalgam of coffee and social space, as the British pub is one of beer and space).

Show and tell

Truly innovative products apply either of these principles – they are disruptive as they violate cognitive schemata, or they blend two different schemata into a third, transcendent one. In any case, you end up with the most desirable product you can imagine: a category killer. Its viral effect is implicit, and as it is genuinely disruptive, that is, worth talking about, all you have to is as a marketer is to make the product visible and provide the means for amplifying the evangelism of the most zealous product advocates. That’s exactly what Apple does.

Successful innovative products are always viral because they disrupt and/or transcend and accumulate meaning as they are being shared. Their distribution will be contagious, and by being passed on by advocates they become a cultural meme that is more powerful than anything your marketing dollars could ever buy.

Of course, this also removes the artificial barriers between product development and go-to-market, between product design and branding, between product innovation and innovative marketing. They are inexorably intertwined. The product is the story. The story is the product. And it’d better be viral.

Friend Your Foes - Adobe’s Conversational Apple Ad

Now this is just brilliant. Adobe has found the only possible way to respond to the lack of love it is getting from Apple – EVEN MORE LOVE.

To counter Steve Jobs' recent rant that Flash wasn't "appropriate for mobile devices" (justifying its ban from Apple products like the iPhone and the iPad), Adobe launched a new ad campaign today in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and several other newspapers and online news sites. The ad sports the headline "We ♥ Apple" and continues with: "We love creativity," and "We love flash," but "What we don’t love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the Web."

What’s so interesting about this campaign is that it bridges traditional media with social media, making advertising conversational (again). There’s already a ton of buzz on Twitter and blogs about the ad.

Edward Boches has described it most aptly: “Adobe’s ad (...) becomes just one more reminder that social media isn’t something separated from traditional media. Even more importantly it’s further proof that our consumers don’t simply read, they create, distribute and best of all, amplify. We may not all have a subject as juicy as the rivalry between Adobe and Apple. But it doesn’t mean we can’t use our offline efforts to “start” conversations. After all, there’s nothing to join if someone doesn’t initiate it.”

On the Eve of Marketing 2.0, the Dawn of Marketing 3.0?

I’m en route to the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris, one of the most respected gatherings of marketing executives presenting and discussing the latest trends in their field. In a way, the story of the conference is the story of marketing itself. The somewhat yesteryear name indicates that a few years ago, when Marketing 2.0 premiered, it was conceived as a forum for pioneers who were early on embracing digital marketing and social media. Times have changed. What used to be at the fringes of the profession has moved into the mainstream, and both program and attendees of Marketing 2.0 reflect that. That’s not a bad thing. Digital marketing IS marketing, social media IS media. You would think..

According to data from eROI and eMarketing & Commerce (eM+C), US marketers spent 13% of their online marketing time on social media in 2009, the second-largest share of any tactic. And yet, a recent eMarketer article claims that social media is still not fully integrated into the marketing mix and in many cases remains an ad-hoc activity that is siloed in the organization and under-budgeted. The level of integration varies vastly depending on the tactic. The publication cites research from marketing management firm Unica suggesting that a majority of voting features, product reviews, user-generated content and RSS feeds are integrated with other campaigns, however, less so social networking sites, blogs, or micro-blogs. Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst, suspects (in an earlier report called “Five Reasons Why Marketers Need to Have a Social Media Strategy”) that marketers often neglect an integrated strategy because they – mistakenly – believe that social media is easy and cheap, ignoring that “much of the real cost of social campaigns is in the people-hours spent fostering and maintaining social conversations.”

The full integration of social media is only a matter of time, but the next frontier of marketing innovation is not yet on the horizon. In many ways, we still live in a marketing 2.0 world: marketing programs that leverage social networks, blogs, mobile, Twitter, real-time conversations, social content, viral memes, crowdsourcing, and so forth have become the norm. Just this week, I had a meeting with the online marketing team of a leading German automaker, and it is hard to imagine anything that would be news to them. They have it all figured out, really, as have almost all big-brand marketing departments. Most of the conversations I have with marketing professionals these days are around tactical issues – budgeting, staffing, monitoring, and, of course, measurement, which is a sure sign of a market-wide saturation. In Gartner Hype-Cycle speak: social media has reached a plateau, and it will soon reach the trope of productivity, as the enterprise-wide implementation of social media collaboration tools is on the rise. You will be hard pressed to find anyone these days who would deny the profound change social media presents for all customer relations; the new need for openness, agility, and hyper-sociality; as well as the call for “networked” (or “federated,” as Forrester calls it) organizations. David Armano (with Edelman), Francois Goisseaux from Beeline Labs (and his upcoming book on The Hyper-Social Organization), or Charlene Li and her Altimeter Group are just some of the pundits who have very succinctly articulated these themes.

But where’s the next hype? Looking at the usual industry augurs, Forrester has produced some good thinking on interactive marketing (with its ‘new 4 Ps of Marketing’: permission, proximity, perception, and participation), and BBH Labs clearly is the thought leader when it comes to the confluence of advertising, social media, and digital storytelling. But all that is an apt description of state-of-the-art practices rather than breaking new ground Augmented Reality and Transmedia may rise to the occasion, and there is the exciting possibility that the iPad finally enables brands to become full-blown publishers. And the whole notion of “Marketing with Meaning” has certainly introduced a new perspective, injecting the dusty CSR model with a more tangible and Millennial-friendly proposition of cause-driven social innovation. Chief Culture, Chief Experience, Chief Meaning, and Chief Convergence Officers and other variations are heralded as the manifestations of innovative marketing models, but at the end of the day all they represent was already stated – loud and clear – by the Clue Train Manifesto in 1999.

Notwithstanding the lack of new paradigms, the marketing function is definitely better positioned than it was a few years ago. It has benefited from the growing convergence of disciplines, media, and formats that shape today’s company-customer interactions: Product design firms are moving into advertising. Advertisers are launching product innovation offerings. Marketers employ design thinking. Design firms are adding go-to-market services. Innovation consultancies are selling iPhone apps. Interactive agencies take on mobile advertising. PR firms are offering branding services. And so on. While creative disciplines are converging, the modes of effective (digital) interactions are converging as well: the combination of real-time, social, mobile, location-based, augmented, and gaming elements are the secret sauce of almost every integrated program these days. Campaigns are becoming products (as just one example, look at AKQA’s recent launch of its Digital Products Group), and marketing innovation is evolving into marketing IT. Marketers, as the renaissance men of 21st century business, can be at the heart of this all, if they’re smart.

Fig. The Great Marketing Convergence

BBH Labs describes the tremendous opportunity ahead: “It’s not just the marketing organization that needs to reorient itself given the now normal digital age, but the company itself should consider how it reorients itself around its marketing organization. In most progressive companies, it is the marketing function that has most quickly and deeply engaged with the new interactive toolkit.”

Marketing is back at the table. Now it needs to demonstrate that it has the chops to innovate and really drive change in organizations.