Category Archives: Customer Relationships

Google’s New Brand Launch – Function Driving Form

What would happen if you created an advertising agency run by engineers?

You’d have Google. That’s what.

Last week, I was on the road. I went to Google something on my smartphone, and noticed the logo had changed. I thought at first it was a Doodle commemorating some famous typeface designer, so I didn’t spend too much time digging into it. But on the next day, when the new Google word mark was still there, I decided to see if this was deliberate and permanent. Sure enough, Google had quietly swapped out their brand identity. And they did it in classic Google style.

I wasn’t a fan – at first. But I was looking at it from a purely aesthetic perspective. I prefer classic serif faces. I love the elegance of the curvatures and strokes. Sans serif faces always seem to me to be trying too hard to be accessible. They’re like the puppies of the design world, constantly licking your face. Serif faces are like cats – stretching luxuriously and challenging you to love them on their terms.

But the more I thought – and read – about the branding change, the more I realized that the move was driven by function over form. Google was creating a visual and iconic language with the change. It was driven by the realities of maintaining an identity across a fragmentation of platforms and contexts. One can almost imagine the requirements document that had been put forth to the design team by the various Google engineers that decide these things – a logo that minimizes visual friction and cognitive load – scales well on all screens from nano to peta configurations (and eventually yocto to yotta)– acts as a visual wayfinder no matter where you are in the Google universe – and looks just a little whimsical (the last of these being a concession to the fine arts intern that was getting lattes and Red Bull for the group).

In the last month, Google has announced a massive amount of corporate change. Any other company would have taken the opportunity to mount a publicity event roughly the size of the Summer Olympics. But Google just quietly slipped these things into their weekly to do list. The logo dropped on a Tuesday. A Tuesday! Who the hell rebrands themselves on a Tuesday? There was no corporate push from Google other than a fairly muted blog post, but in researching this column, I found commentary on the change on pretty much every major media. And they weren’t just reporting the change. They were debating it, commenting on it, engaging in it. People gave a damn, either for or against.

That’s when I realized the significance of Google’s move. Because function was driving form – because engineers were dictating to designers – the branding had to be closer to its market. The rebranding was being done to make our lives easier. It wasn’t there to launch some misguided agency driven interpretation of an envisioned future, or slide Google into some strategic position in the marketplace. It was done because if wasn’t done, Google couldn’t do all the rest of the stuff it had to do. Google didn’t tell us what we should think of the move. They just did it and let us decide.

If function determines branding, then it’s living in the right place – the intersection between the market and the marketer. I’ve previously chastised Google for their lack of design thinking, but in this case, maybe they got it right. And maybe there’s a lesson there we all need to learn about the new rules of branding.

Why Disruptive Change is Disruptive

There were a lot of responses to my last column, looking at why agencies and clients have hit the point of irreconcilable differences. Many of those responses were in agreement. In fact, none were in outright disagreement. This surprised me. A lot of Online Spin readers are people who work for very big agencies. I can only conclude that you elected to show your dissention through your silence.

But there were many that fell in the “Yeah-but” category:

Tiffany Lyman Otten wrote,

“This, like anything, is a sign simply that agencies must evolve – again.

Jill Montaigne adds,

“Yet, our own ongoing advertiser conversations confirm that rather than walking away from their traditional agency relationships, clients desperately need and want their agencies to evolve.”

David Vawter chimes in,

“As long as there is something to sell, people will be needed to create and produce the ideas that sell it.”

Agreed. But…

All of the above comments pointed to a new trend in the marketing ecosystem – that of a network of specialists, often in the form of micro-agencies, that appear to be finding niches to hang on to in the tidal wave of change that is sweeping over our industry.

I used to head one of these agencies. Our area of specialty was in user behavior with search interfaces. We did well in this niche. So well, in fact, that we were eventually acquired by a bigger agency. Bigger agencies are always vertically integrated. As such, they offer clients the one-stop shop model. They move to that model because that is the model they know. It is the model they are programmed to create. It is an organizational form that is dictated by their P&L targets. There is no operational wiggle-room here. They simply can’t become anything else.

Tiffany, Jill and several others all used the word evolve, like it is a magical formula for survival. But evolution is like a tree. Once your branch has been determined, you have to evolve outward from that branch. You can’t suddenly leap to another branch. If you’re a chimpanzee, you can’t suddenly decide one day to evolve into a budgie. You can evolve into a new type of chimpanzee, but you’re still a chimpanzee.

What does happen in evolution, however, is that the environment changes so drastically that the tree is dramatically pruned. Some branches are lopped off, so that new branches can sprout. This is called punctuated equilibrium, and, as I’ve said before, this is what I believe we’re going through right now in marketing. Yes, as David rightly notes, “As long as there is something to sell, people will be needed to create and produce the ideas that sell it.” It’s just that the form that takes may be dramatically different that what we currently know. It could be – correction – will be a marketing ecosystem that will be dominated by new species of marketers.

We tend to equate evolution with change – but evolution is a very specific kind of change. It’s change in response to environmental pressures. And while individual species can evolve, so can entire ecosystems. In that bigger picture, some species will emerge and thrive and others will disappear. What is happening to agencies now is just a ripple effect from a much bigger environmental change – analogous to a planet size asteroid slamming into the business and marketing ecosystem that evolved over the past two centuries.

Big agencies are the result of corporate evolution in the previous ecosystem. We are quick to take them to task for being slow, or dumb, or oblivious to client needs. And perhaps, in the new ecosystem, those things are true. But those are the characteristics of the species. No agency intends to be dumb or unresponsive. It’s just an evolutionary mismatch caused by massive disruption in the environment.

These things happen. It’s actually a good thing. Joseph Schumpeter called it Creative Destruction. But, as the name implies, it’s a zero sum game. For something to be created, something has to be destroyed.

Why Agencies and Clients are Calling It Quits

“Love on the Rocks – ain’t no surprise.”

Neil Diamond

In yesterday’s Online Spin, Maarten Albarda signaled the imminent break up of agencies and clients. Communication is close to zero. Fingers are being pointed. The whisper campaign has turned into outright hostility.

When relationships end, it can be because one of the parties is just not trying. But that isn’t the case here. I believe agencies are truly trying to patch things up. They are trying to understand their one-time life partner. They are desperately gobbling up niche shops and investing in technology in order to respark the flame. And the same is true, I believe, on the client side. They want to feel loved again by their agency of record.

I think what’s happening here is more akin to a break up that happens because circumstances have changed and the respective parties haven’t been able to keep up. This is more like high school sweethearts looking at each other 20 years hence and realizing that what once bonded them is long gone. And, if that’s true, it might be helpful to look back and see what happened.

The problem here is that the agency is a child of a marketplace that is rapidly disappearing. It is the result of the creation of the “Visible Hand” market. In his book of the same name, Alfred Chandler went to great lengths (over 600 pages) to chronicle the rise of the modern organization. The modern concept of an advertising agency was a by-product of that. Vertically integrated organizations came about to overcome some inherent inefficiencies in the market – notably the problem of geography and the lack of a functional marketplace network that came with rapid expansions in production and transportation capabilities. Essentially, markets grew too rapidly for Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” to be able to effectively balance through market dynamics. Organizations grew to mammoth size in order to provide internal efficiencies that allowed for greater profitability. You had to be big to be competitive. Agents of all types filled the gaps that were inevitable in a rapidly expanding market place. Essentially an agent bridged the gap between two or more separate nodes in a market network. They were the business equivalent of Mark Granovetter’s “weak tie.”

Through the 20th century advertising agents evolved into creative houses – which is where they hit their golden period. But why was this creativity needed? Essentially, agencies evolved when advances in production and distribution technologies weren’t enough to expand markets anymore. Suddenly, companies needed agencies to create demand in existing and identified markets through the sparking desire. This was the final hurray of the “visible hand” marketplace.

But the explosion of networking technologies and the reduction of transactional friction is turning the “visible hand” market back into the “invisible hand” market of Adam Smith – driven by the natural laws of marketplaces. The networks of the marketplace are becoming more connected than ever.

This is a highly dynamic, cyclical market. Straight line strategic planning doesn’t work here. And straight line strategic planning is a fundamental requirement of an agency relationship. That level of stasis is needed to overcome the inherent gaps in a third party relationship. Even under the best of circumstances, an arm’s length relationship can’t effectively “make sense” of the market environment and react quickly enough to maneuver in this marketplace. And, as Albarda points out, the client-agency relationship is far from healthy.

The ironic part is all of this is that what was once an agency’s strength – its position as a bridge between existing networks, has turned into its greatest vulnerability. Technology has essential removed the gaps in the market itself, allowing clients to become more effectively linked to natural networks of customers through emerging channels that are also increasingly mediated by technology. Middlemen are no longer needed. Those gaps have disappeared. But the gap that has always been there, between the agent and the client, not only still exists, but is widening with the breakdown of the relationship. Agencies are like bridges without a river to span.

If you read the common complaints from both sides in the presentations Albarda references , they all come from the ever-widening schism that has come from a drastic change in the market itself. Simply put, the market has evolved to the point where agency relationships are no longer tenable. We on the agency side keep saying we need to reinvent ourselves, but that’s like saying that a dog has to reinvent itself to become a fish – it’s just not in our DNA.

Feed Up with Feedback Requests

Sorry Google. I realize this is my last chance to tell you about my experience. But you see, you’re in a long line of companies that are also desperate for the juicy details of my various consumer escapades. Best Western, Ford, Kia, Home Depot, Apple, Samsung – my in box is completely clogged with pleas for the “dets” of my transactional interactions with them. I’ve never been more popular – or frustrated.

I appreciate the idea of customer follow up. I really do. But as company after company jumps on the customer feedback bandwagon, poor ordinary mortals like myself don’t have a hope in hell of keeping up. It could be a full time job just filling out surveys and rating every aspect of my life on a scale that runs from “abysmal” to “awesome” The irony is, these customer feedback requests are actually having the opposite effect. Even if my interactions with the brand are satisfactory, the incessant nagging to find out if I “like them, I really like them” are beginning to piss me off. In the quest to quantify brand affinity, these companies are actually eroding it. Ooops! Talk about unintended consequences.

So, if we accept the fact that knowing what our customers think about us is a good thing, and we also accept the fact that our customers have better things to do with their lives than fill out post-purchase surveys, we have to find a more elegant way to get the job done.

First of all, customer feedback should be part of a full customer relationship continuum. It should be just one customer touch point, not the customer touch point. You have to earn the credibility that gives you the right to ask for my feedback. Too many companies don’t worry about gauging satisfaction “in the moment.” If you don’t care enough to ask if I’m happy when I’m right in front of you, why should I believe that you’ll pay any attention to my survey. But too many companies jam this request for feedback on their customers without doing the spadework required to build a relationship first.

Worse, because compensation is increasingly being tied to feedback results, you get the “please say you’ll love me” pleading on the sales floor. See if this sounds familiar: “You’ll be receiving a survey from head office asking me how I’ve done. I don’t get a bonus unless you give me top marks in each category. So if there’s anything I can do better, please tell me now.” There are so many things that are just plain wrong with this that I don’t know where to start. It’s smarmy and disingenuous. It also puts the customer in a very awkward position. When it’s happened to me, I just murmur something like, “No, you’ve been great,” and run with all speed to the nearest exit.

The next thing we have to realize is that not all purchases are created equal. Remember the Risk/Reward matrix I talked about in last week’s column about how our brains process pricing information? While this applies to our motivational balance going into a purchase, it also provides some clues to the emotion landscape that exists post-purchase. If the purchase was in the low risk/low reward quadrant, like the home improvement supplies I picked up at Home Depot this weekend, it’s a task that has been crossed off my to-do list. It’s done. It’s over. The last thing I want to do is prolong that task by filling out a survey about said task. But, if it’s something that falls into the high risk/high reward quadrant, such as a major vacation, then I am probably more apt to invest some time to give you some feedback. The Rule of Thumb is: the higher the degree of risk or reward, the more likely I am to fill out a survey.

The final thing to remember about customer surveys is that you’re capturing extremes. The people who fill out surveys are usually the ones that either hate you or love you. So you get a very skewed perspective on how you’re doing. What you’re missing is the vast middle of your market that may not be sufficiently motivated to toss you either a brick or a bouquet.

I’m all for getting to know your customers better. But it has to be part of a total approach. It begins with simple things, like actually listening to them when you’re engaging with them.

The Coming Data Marketplace

The stakes are currently being placed in the ground. The next great commodity will be data and you can already sense the battle beginning the heat up.

Consumer data will be generated by connections. Those connections will fall into two categories: broad and deep. Both will generate data points that will become critical to businesses looking to augment their own internal data.

First, broad data is the domain of Google, Apple, Amazon, eBay and Facebook. Their play is it to stretch their online landscape as broadly as possible, generating thousands of new potential connections with the world at large. Google’s new “Buy” button is a perfect example of this. Adding to the reams of conversion data Google already collects, the “Buy” button means that Google will control even more transactional landscape. They’re packaging it with the promise of an improved mobile buying experience, but the truth is that purchases will be consummated on Google controlled territory, allowing them to harvest the rich data that will be generated from millions of individual transactions across every conceivable industry category. If Google can control a critical mass of connected touch points across the online landscape, they can get an end-to-end view of purchase behavior. The potential of that data is staggering.

In this market, data will be stripped of identity and aggregated to provide a macro but anonymous view of market behaviors. As the market evolves, we’ll be able to subscribe to data services that will provide real time views of emerging trends and broad market intelligence that can be sliced and diced in thousands of ways. Of course, Google (and their competitors) will have a free hand to use all this data to offer advertisers new ways to target ever more precisely.

This particular market is an online territory grab. It relies on a broad set of touch points with as many people across as many devices as possible. The more territory that is covered, the more comprehensive the data set.

The other data market will run deep. Consider the new health tracking devices like Fitbit, Garmin’s VivoActive and Apple’s iWatch. Focused purpose hardware and apps will rely on deep relationships with users. The more reliant you become on these devices, the more valuable the data collected will become. But this data comes with a caveat – unlike the broad data market, this data should not be striped of its identity. The value of the data comes from its connection with an individual. Therefore, that individual has to be an active participant in any potential data marketplaces. The data collector will act more as a data middleman – brokering matches between potential customers and vendors. If the customer agrees, they can choose to release the data to the vendor (or at least, a relevant subset of the data) in order to individualize the potential transaction.

As the data marketplace evolves, expect an extensive commercial eco-system to emerge. Soon, there will be a host of services that will take raw data and add value through interpretation, aggregation and filtering. Right now, the onus for data refinement falls on the company who is attempting to embrace Big Data marketing. As we move forward, expect an entire Big Data value chain to emerge. But it will all rely on players like Google, Amazon and Apple who have the front line access to the data itself. Just as natural resources provided the grist that drove the last industrial revolution, expect data to be the resource that fuels the next one.

An Eulogy for “Kathy” – The First Persona

My column last week on the death of the persona seemed to find a generally agreeable audience. But prior to tossing our cardboard cutouts of “Sally the Soccer Mom” in the trash bin, let’s just take a few minutes to remind ourselves why personas were created in the first place.

Alan Cooper – the father of usability personas – had no particular methodology in mind when he created “Kathy,” his first persona. Kathy was based on a real person that Cooper had talked to during his research for a new project management program. Cooper found himself with a few hours on his hands every day when his early 80’s computer chugged away, compiling the latest version of his program. He would use the time to walk around a golf course close to his office and run through the design in his head. One day, he engaged himself in an imaginary dialogue with “Kathy,” a potential customer who was requesting features based on her needs. Soon, he was deep in his internal discussion with Kathy. His first persona was a way to get away from the computer and cubicle and get into the skin of a customer.

There are a few points here that important to note. “Kathy” was based on input from a real person. The creation of “Kathy” had no particular goal, other than to give Cooper a way to imagine how a customer might use his program. It was a way to make the abstract real, and to imagine that reality through the eyes of another person. At the end we realize that the biggest goal of a persona is just that – to imagine the world through someone else’s eyes.

As we transition from personas to data modeling, it’s essential to keep that aspect alive. We have to learn how to live in someone else’s skin. We have to somehow take on the context of their world and be aware of their beliefs, biases and emotions. Until we do this, the holy grail of the “Market of One” is just more marketing hyperbole.

I think the persona started its long decline towards death when it transitioned from a usability tool to a marketing one. Personas were never intended to be a slide deck or a segmentation tool. They were just supposed to be a little mental trick to allow designers to become more empathetic – to slip out of their own reality and into that of a customer. But when marketers got their hands on personas, they do what marketers tend to do. They added the gloss and gutted the authenticity. At that moment, personas started to die.

So, for all the reasons I stated last week, I think personas should be allowed to slip away into oblivion. But if we do so, we have to find a way to understand the reality of our customers on a one to one basis. We have to find a better way to accomplish what personas were originally intended to do. We have to be more empathetic.

Because humans are humans, and not spreadsheets, I’m not sure we can get all the way there with data alone. Data analysis forces us to put on another set of lenses – ones that analyze – not empathize. Those lenses help us to see the “what” but not the “why.” It’s the view of the world that Alan Cooper would have had if he never left his cubicle to walk around the Old Del Monte golf course, waving his arms and carrying on his internal dialogue with “Kathy.” The way to empathize is to make connections with our customers – in the real world – where they live and play.  It’s using qualitative methods like ethnographic research to gain insights that can then be verified with data. Personas may be dead, but qualitative research is more important than ever.

Deconstructing the Market of One

“So, what are you doing now?” My old college friend asked, right after he finished swearing at me because of my early retirement. He assumed I’d be doing something related to marketing.

“I’m starting a cycling tourism business.”

“A what…?”

“Cycling tours.”

“Do you know anything about cycling tours?”

“Not really.”

“Hmmm. Okay. Well, that’s good. It is good, isn’t it?”

“I guess so. We’ll see.”

Truth be told, I’m probably getting too much pleasure from these little flashes of cognitive dissonance that happen when I tell people about my current project. I like watching as they struggle to connect the dots. Maybe it’s because it gives me some comic relief from my own struggles to connect the dots. But I’m beginning to suspect there may by a silver lining in my ignorance. Because I know so little about this business, I’m also taking a different approach to the one aspect I should know something about – the marketing of it.

Connected People in NetworkI could have jumped in and started lining up search campaigns, digging into social media targeting and setting up email campaigns. But instead, I took a step back and looked at the most successful cycling tourism operation I know – the Hotel Belvedere in Riccione, Italy. It’s become a mecca for road cyclists. This year, TripAdvisor rated it as one of the top 20 hotels in the world, based on the rave reviews of it’s cycling clientele. If you’re a road cyclist, chances are pretty good that you’ve heard of the Hotel Belvedere. And if you have heard of it, chances are extremely good that you heard about it from a friend who also cycles. The Belvedere has built its substantial business largely on word of mouth.

We all know word of mouth is the most effective form of advertising. But why is it so effective? We typically assume it’s because the message is coming from an objective source that we trust. But I suspect there’s more to it than that. I think it’s because word of mouth is almost always delivered from one person to another. Word of mouth is messaging to a market of one.

There are some fundamental aspects of this that bear closer examination. Word of mouth usually occurs between friends, or, at the least, acquaintances. That means both parties have at least a passing understanding of each other. They know of common interests and personal likes and dislikes. This allows the message to be tailored for optimal reception. The most effective points of persuasion can be embellished and the least effective ones can be skimmed over. Messages are pre-filtered based on an implicit understanding of the audience.

Secondly, word of mouth advertising is based on a two-way conversation. The message evolves according to that conversation. Questions can be asked. Areas of interest can be explored more deeply. Concerns can be addressed. And, all along the way, both parties learn more about what a future engagement between the prospect and the product in question would look like.

I suspect the power of Word of Mouth comes not just in the objectivity of the sender of the message, but also in the medium in which the message is delivered (thank you Mr. McLuhan). And, if this is the case, then we should see how the strengths of that medium could be extended to other marketing efforts. We should deconstruct the advantages of targeting a Market of One.

The biggest hurdle seems to be the lack of mass normally associated with marketing. In my case, I’m actually planning for a slower approach to marketing, building allowances into the business plan for a marketing plan based on building engagements one at a time. If you’ve ever read Eric Ries’s excellent book, The Lean Start Up, you already know such things are possible. The advantage of the Market of One approach is that each encounter also provides invaluable market feedback, allowing to you to continually evolve your offering. You focus on going deep, rather than going wide. Each encounter gives you the opportunity to create a friendship.

The Messy Part of Marketing

messymarketingMarketing is hard. It’s hard because marketing reflects real life. And real life is hard. But here’s the thing – it’s just going to get harder. It’s messy and squishy and filled with nasty little organic things like emotions and human beings.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been filing things away as possible topics for this column. For instance, I’ve got a pretty big file of contradicting research on what works in B2B marketing. Videos work. They don’t work. Referrals are the bomb. No, it’s content. Okay, maybe it’s both. Hmmm..pretty sure it’s not Facebook though.

The integration of marketing technology was another promising avenue. Companies are struggling with data. They’re drowning in data. They have no idea what to do with all the data that’s pouring in from smart watches and smart phones and smart bracelets and smart bangles and smart suppositories and – okay, maybe not suppositories, but that’s just because no one thought of it till I just mentioned it.

Then there’s the new Google tool that predicts the path to purchase. That sounds pretty cool. Marketers love things that predict things. That would make life easier. But life isn’t easy. So marketing isn’t easy. Marketing is all about trying to decipher the mangled mess of living just long enough to shoehorn in a message that maybe, just maybe that will catch the right person at the right time. And that mangled mess is just getting messier.

Personally, the thing that attracted me to marketing was its messiness. I love organic, gritty problems with no clear-cut solutions. Scientists call these ill-defined problems. And that’s why marketing is hard. It’s an ill-defined problem. It defies programmatic solutions. You can’t write an algorithm that will spit out perfect marketing. You can attack little slivers of marketing that lend themselves to clearer solutions, which is why you have the current explosion of ad-tech tools. But the challenge is trying to bring all these solutions together into some type of cohesive package that actually helps you relate to a living, breathing human.

One of the things that has always amazed me is how blissfully ignorant most marketers are about concepts that I think should be fundamental to understanding customer behaviors: things like bounded rationality, cognitive biases, decision theory and sense-making. Mention any of these things in a conference room full of marketers and watch eyes glaze over as fingers nervously thumb through the conference program, looking for any session that has “Top Ten” or “Surefire” in it’s title.

Take Information Foraging Theory, for instance. Anytime I speak about a topic that touches on how humans find information (which is almost always), I ask my audience of marketers if they’ve ever heard of I.F.T. Generally, not one hand goes up. Sometimes I think Jakob Nielsen and I are the only two people in the world that recognize I.F.T. for what it is: “the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993.” (Jakob’s words). If you take the time to understand this one concept I promise it will fundamentally and forever change how you look at web design, search marketing, creative and ad placement. Web marketers should be building a shrine to Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card. Their names should be on the tips of every marketer’s tongue. But I venture to guess that most of you reading this column never heard of them until today.

None of these fundamental concepts about human behavior are easy to grasp. Like all great ideas, they are simple to state but difficult to understand. They cover a lot of territory – much of it ill defined. I’ve spent most of my professional life trying to spread awareness of things like Information Foraging Theory. Can I always predict human behavior? Not by a long shot. But I hope that by taking the time to learn more about the classic theories of how we humans tick, I have also learned a little more about marketing. It’s not easy. It’s not perfect. It’s a lot like being human. But I’ve always believed that to be an effective marketer, you first need to understand humans.

Can A Public Company Keep a Start Up Attitude?

google-glass1

Google is possibly the most interesting company in the world right now. But being interesting does not necessarily equate with being successful. And therein lies the rub.

Case in point. Google is taking another crack at Google Glass. Glass has the potential to be a disruptive technology. And the way Google approached it was very much in the Google way of doing things. They put a beta version out there and asked for feedback from the public. Some of that feedback was positive, but much of it was negative. That is natural. It’s the negative feedback you’re looking for, because it shows what has to be changed. The problem is that Glass V 0.9 is now pegged as a failure. So as Laurie Sullivan reported, Google is trying a different approach, which appears to be taken from Apple’s playbook. They’re developing under wraps, with a new product lead, and you probably won’t see another version of Glass until it’s ready to ship as a viable market-ready product.

The problem here is that Google may have lost too much time. As Sullivan points out, Intel, Epson and Microsoft are all working on consumer versions of wearable visual interfaces. And they’re not alone. A handful of aggressive start-ups are also going after Glass, including Meta, Vuzix, Optinvent, Glassup and Recon. And none of them will attract the attention of Google, simply because they’re not Google.

Did Google screw up with the first release of Google Glass? Probably not. In fact, if you read Eric Ries’s The Lean Start Up, they did a lot of things right. They got a minimally viable product in front of a market to test it and see what to improve. No, Google’s problem wasn’t with their strategy; it was with their speed. As Ries states,

“The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible.”

Google didn’t move fast enough with Glass. And I suspect it was because Google isn’t a start up, so it can’t act like one. Again, from Ries,

“The problem isn’t with the teams or the entrepreneurs. They love the chance to quickly get their baby out into the market. They love the chance to have the customer vote instead of the suits voting. The real issue is with the leaders and the middle managers.”

Google isn’t the only company to feel the constricting bonds of being a public company. There is a long list of world changing technologies that were pioneered at places like Xerox and Microsoft and were tagged as corporate failures, only to eventually change the world in someone else’s hands.

I suspect the days are many when Larry Page and Sergey Brin are sorry they ever decided to take Google public. Back then, they probably thought that the vast economic resources that would become available, combined with their vision, would make an unbeatable combination. But in the process of going public, they were forced to compromise on the very spirit that was defined by that vision. They want to do great things, but they still need to hit their quarterly targets and keep shareholders happy. The two things shouldn’t be mutually exclusive, but sadly they almost always are.

It’s probably no accident that Apple does their development in stealth mode. Apple has much more experience than Google in being a public company. They have probably realized that it’s not the buying public that you keep in the dark, it’s the analysts and shareholders. Otherwise, they’ll look at the early betas, an essential step in the development process, and pass judgment, tagging them as failures long before such judgments are justified. It would be like condemning a newborn baby as hopeless because they can’t drive a car yet.

Google is dreaming big dreams. I admire that. I just worry that the structure of Google might not be the right vehicle in which to pursue those dreams.

The Virtuous Cycle and the End of Arm’s Length Marketing

brandstewardshipLast week I wrote what should have been an open and shut column – looking at why SEO never really lived up to the potential of the business opportunity. Then my friend Scott Brinker had to respond with this comment:

“Seems like Google has long been focused on making SEO a “result” of companies doing good things, rather than a search-specific optimization “cause” to generate good rankings. They seem to have gotten what they wanted. Now as Google starts to do that with paid search, the world gets interesting for those agencies too..”

Steven Aresenault jumped on the bandwagon with this:

“Companies are going to wake up to the reality that part of their marketing is really about creating content. Content is everywhere and everything. Reality is I believe that it is a new way of thinking.”

As they both point out, SEO should be a natural result of a company doing good things, not the outcome of artificial manipulations practiced by a third party. It has to be baked into and permeate through the operating DNA of a company. But, as I started this column, I realized that this doesn’t stop at SEO. This is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Marketing, at least the way it’s been done up to now, is fundamentally broken. And it’s because many companies still rely on what I would call “Arm’s Length Marketing.”

Brand Stewardship = B.S.

Here is a quote lifted directly from the Ogilvy Mather website:

We believe our role as 360 Degree Brand Stewards is this: Creating attention-getting messages that make a promise consistent and true to the brand’s image and identity. And guiding actions, both big and small, that deliver on that brand promise. To every audience that brand has. At every brand intersection point. At all times.

Now, Ogilvy is very good at crafting messages and this one is no exception. Who could possibly argue with their view of brand stewardship? The problem comes when you look at what “stewardship” means. Here’s the Merriam Webster definition:

the conducting, supervising, or managing of something; especially :  the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care

The last five words are the key – “something entrusted to one’s care”. This implies that the agency has functional control of the brand, and with due apologies to David Ogilvy and his cultural legacy, that is simply bullshit.

Brands = Experience

Hmmm - coincidence?

Hmmm – coincidence?

Maybe Arm’s Length Brand Stewardship was possible in the era of David Ogilvy, Don Draper and Darrin Stephens (now, there’s a pop culture trifecta for you) – where brand messaging defined the brand, but that era is long gone. Brands used to be crafted from exposure, but now they’re created through experience, amplified through the resonant network of the online community. And an arm’s length third party cannot, nor should they, control that experience. It has to live at the heart of the company. For decades, companies abdicated the responsibility of brand stewardship to the communication experts – or, to do a little word crafting – they “entrusted (it) to (their) care.” That has to change. Marketing has to come back home.

The Virtuous Marketing Cycle

Scott talked about the SEO rewards that come from doing good things. Steven talked about authentic content creation being one of those good things. But this is a much bigger deal. This is about forcefully moving marketing’s place in the strategic chain. Currently, the order is this: Management > Strategy > Marketing > Revenue. Marketing’s current job is to execute on strategy, which comes from management. And, in that scenario, it’s plausible to execute at arm’s length. Also, things like SEO and content management fall well down the chain, typically beneath the threshold of senior management awareness. By the way, usability and other user-centric practices typically suffer the same fate.

But what if we moved our thinking from a chain to a cycle: Marketing > Management > Strategy > Marketing > Revenue > Marketing (and repeat)? Let me explain. To begin with, Marketing is perfectly situated to become the “sensemaking” interface with the market. This goes beyond market research, which very seldom truly informs strategy. Market research in its current form is typically intended to optimize the marketing program.

I’m talking about a much bigger role – Marketing would define the “outside in” view of the company which would form the context within which strategy would be determined by Management. Sensemaking as it applies to corporate strategy is a huge topic, but for brevity’s sake, let’s suppose that Marketing fills the role of the corporation’s five senses, defining what reality looks (and smells and sounds and tastes and feels) like . Then, when strategy is defined within that context, Marketing is well positioned to execute on it. Finally, execution is not the end – it is the beginning of another cycle. Sense making is an iterative process. Marketing then redefines what reality looks like and the cycle starts over again.

Bringing stewardship of marketing back to the very heart of the organization fundamentally changes things like arm’s length agency partnerships. It creates a virtuous cycle that runs through length and breadth of a company’s activities. Things like SEO, content creation and usability naturally fall into place.