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Concluding some of the rough thoughts begun here in part 1 on how marketing planning will need to change given the fact that marketing itself has changed.
Remember, I am just putting these out there for consideration. This thing is far from baked…yet.
What I have been arguing for is an evolution of the role of marketing and marketing planning from a team that is responsible for drawing up big plans and executing them to a team that is responsible for laying out a vision and then providing the logistical support to enable those on the front lines of the organization to aid in the execution of it.
While I am not a military historian, I think there may be an analogy to the evolution of the perception of warfare as it moved out of conventional (WWII and Cold War type) to network/distributed (al Qaeda, Iraq, etc.)
So, our marketers then become responsible for a number of things.
- Be the leader to the rest of the organization in terms of “what are the types of stories that we want to tell?” reflected in Commander’s Intent.
- To help put in place as many of the variable that can be addressed to increase the likelihood of something “going viral.”
- Modify the approach from a few big campaigns/initiatives to a “dandelion/dollar cost averaging” approach where agile marketing development reigns supreme and “non-marketers” are empowered to act like marketers, communicating the feel of the brand, even if the look may not always be 100% aligned.
- Listening to the responses of the marketplace through shorter feedback loops and disseminating that knowledge throughout, not hoarding it.
- And last, but certainly not least, creating a culture of high fault tolerance for failure.
The first four, it would seem, are really process changes. They are not going to be easy, but they can certainly be done.
It is the last one, the cultural shift where I think that all of us are going to run into problems.
It’s easy to talk innovation, not so easy to deliver.
I actually pinged some folks I know at both Bell Labs and Microsoft Research to get their thoughts/reactions on the cultures within. Some interesting responses came back.
Paul wrote
“at Bell Labs we conceive of innovation as a cube that is composed of three axes or dimensions: an outcome of a creative process, an impact, and time, which is quite important as the creative process and its impact are both heavily influenced by time.”
This is a critical component and, if I can get some latitude, I think it ties into one of the underlying themes in the book Start-Up Nation, about Israel’s economic miracle driven by technological innovation and, even more so, necessity.
The cliché is “necessity is the mother of invention,” but the phrase that stuck with me was “since their country’s founding, Israelis have been keenly aware that the future-both near and distant-is always in question. Every moment has strategic importance.”
In a culture of innovation, there is a sense of urgency. There is pressure. There are time constraints. There are budget constraints.
The reason why I think we fare so poorly at innovation in general is that we don’t have the consequences of Gene Kratz in Apollo 13, “Failure is not an option.”
In Israel, if you fail (in the long term), the country doesn’t exist anymore.
That creates a pretty big drive to keep trying until you get it right.
Jeremy (another one, not me) from Microsoft Research weighed in by saying that, from his perspective:
“Failure is not penalized, only a lack of success… People tend to keep multiple pots boiling at once for this reason, to increase the chance that in a given year you have some success to report -- always with other stuff brewing in the background which may become successful next year, or maybe never. “
So, if we want to figure out a way to drive innovation in our marketing (or throughout the organization), we have to address the cultural paradigm that any failure is bad. It’s not. If we “fail faster, to succeed sooner” as Tim Brown wrote or my client Sue Marks (Pinstripe) likes to say “fail forward,” then that is a good thing.
If you NEVER succeed, that’s a problem, but if you fail today and succeed tomorrow or next week or next year, then that’s a good thing. Obviously there’s a time constraint of some sort (as Paul pointed out) and that’s a balance we need to strike, but recognizing the strategic importance of failure in marketing seems to be of paramount.
Speaking of constraints, the other element is the pressure-cooker side. It may not seem fun to work in a place where the pressure is on and the consequence of failure are great, but somehow we have to figure out how to move our marketers out of the “let’s do the safe/tried and true thing,” to a point where they say “this moment is of strategic importance to the long-term success of the organization and to my career,” and have them act accordingly.
My new friend, Alexandra Levit (who has a great blog and a new book) cites a study she just completed saying that “half of employers say they currently have such a serious gap between their needs and employees’ skills that it affects their productivity.”
And I think that some of those skills come from this ability.
No less an authority than Tom Friedman points this out (albeit in a slightly roundabout way) as he talks about the state of education in America and who those people are who are keeping their jobs…or more accurately, in such high demand, even in this economy. He calls them the “new untouchables.”
“Those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.
That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive.”
I will extend that to organizations and companies (heck, even countries) as well.
Those with the imagination to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies-will thrive.
It’s a Marketing Darwinian moment. We adapt as a species of marketers and recognize the need to take risks to evolve to the next level…or else.
How’s that for pressure?
Your feedback is welcome.
