Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (45 page)

Car dealers are temples of more. The local Ford dealership lists four different models, by decreasing horsepower. Car magazines feature Bugattis, not Priuses, on the cover. Restaurants usually serve more food (and more calories) than a normal person could and should eat.

Is this some sort of character flaw? A defective meme in the system of mankind? Or is it an evil plot dreamed up by marketers?

There’s no doubt that marketers amplify this desire, but I’m certain it’s been around a lot longer than Jell-O.

One reason that the litter campaign of the 1960s worked so well is that “not littering” didn’t require doing less; it just required enough self-control to hold on to your garbage for an hour or two. The Achilles heel of the movement to limit carbon is the word “limit.”

It’s a campaign about less, not more. Even worse, there’s no orthodoxy. There’s argument about whether x or y is a better approach. Argument about how much is enough. As long as there’s wiggle room, our desire for more will trump peer pressure to do less. “Fight global warming” is a fine slogan, except it’s meaningless. That’s like dieters everywhere shouting “eat less” while they stand in line to get blue cheese dressing from the salad bar.

From a marketing standpoint, my best advice is this: let’s figure out how to turn this into a battle to do more, not less. Example one: require all new cars to have, right next to the speedometer, a mileage meter. And
put the same number on an LCD display on the rear bumper. Once there’s an arms race to see who can have the highest number, we’re on the right track.

It’s easy to be wowed by what a magical job the search engines do in finding you just the right needle in the haystack.

The fact is that search engines are very good at fairly simple searches, and very good at finding information about single products, services, people, and ideas.

But they’re terrible at connections, at rankings, at horizontal results. They can’t help me find the 25 most important up-and-coming artists in the United States. They can’t help me find six products that are viable alternatives to something that was just discontinued. They can’t help me rank the service of four accounting firms.

There’s a giant opportunity. (Many opportunities, actually.) It’s to collate and slice and dice and rank domain-specific knowledge and surface it. There are some areas where this is done extremely well (restaurants, for example), but in most cases, it’s not done at all.

Organizing the world’s information is a laudable goal. But we’re only an inch down the road.

What’s a meatball sundae?

Maybe this is familiar. It is to me, anyway:

You go to a marketing meeting. There’s a presentation from the new Internet marketing guy. He’s brought a fancy (and expensive) blogging consultant with him. She starts talking about how blogs and the “Web 2.0 social media infrastructure” are just waiting for your company to dive in. “Try this stuff,” she seems to be saying, “and the rest of your competitive/structural/profit issues will disappear.”

In the last ten years, the Internet and radical changes in media have provided marketers everywhere with a toolbox that allows them to capture attention with seemingly little effort, planning, or cash. Six years
after the dot-com boom, there are more websites, more email users, and more viral ideas, online and offline, than ever before. There are hundreds of cable TV networks and thousands of online radio stations. Not to mention street marketing, email marketing, and Myspace.

Corporations, political parties, nonprofits, job seekers, and yes, even people looking for love are all scrambling around, trying to exploit the power of these new tools. People treat the New Marketing like a kid with a twenty-dollar bill at an ice cream parlor. They keep wanting to add more stuff—more candy bits and sprinkles and cream and cherries. The dream is simple: “If we can just add enough of [today’s hot topping], everything will take care of itself.”

Most of the time, despite all the hype, organizations fail when they try to use this scattershot approach. They fail to get buzz or traffic or noise or sales. Organizations don’t fail because the Web and the New Marketing don’t work. They fail because the Web and the New Marketing work only when applied to the right organization. New Media makes a promise to the consumer. If the organization is unable to keep that promise, then it fails.

New Marketing—whipped cream and a cherry on top—isn’t magical. What’s magical is what happens when an organization uses the New Marketing to become something it didn’t used to be—it’s not just the marketing that’s transformed, but the entire organization. Just as technology propelled certain organizations through the Industrial Revolution, this new kind of marketing is driving the right organizations through the digital revolution.

You can become the right organization. You can align your organization from the bottom up to sync with New Marketing, and you can transform your organization into one that thrives on the new rules.

Talking ’bout a revolution …

Everyone studies the Industrial Revolution in school, but most of us don’t really understand it. The basic idea, it seems, is that Henry Ford, Eli Whitney, and some guy with rifles invented the assembly line, and the whole world changed in about a week.

Actually, we’ve had several industrial revolutions over the last 250 years. While the assembly line, the invention of the corporation, and improvements in transport appear to be the obvious causes, it’s easy to forget that in just a few generations, we saw changes in every element of what it meant to be in business. Standardized quality control, innovative product design for utilitarian products, employees (!), branding, investment, advertising, insurance, product development … the list is miles long.

Why care?

Because just sixty years ago, there was another revolution. This one was caused by the triumph of mass marketing. General Foods, General Motors, and the rest of the consumer-focused
Fortune
500 are organized around a single idea: that efficient factories making average stuff for average people could triumph.

GM had a great run. So did tons of other companies. They figured out how to make stuff in large quantities. Run big factories. Hire and manage large numbers of people. The age of advertising ushered in a revolution that had more impact on organizations (and the planet) than any age that came before it.

The Meatball Sundae is an idea that’s possibly even bigger than that one. When mass marketing dies, the future of the companies that embrace this approach dies, too. We’re living through a wholesale change, but all most of us can do is worry about the color of the links on our blogs.

The Meatball Sundae has a subtle but subversive lesson: change the media, and the organizations change, too. Kiva instead of the American Heart Association, Amazon instead of the local bookstore, MoveOn instead of the DNC.

We’re spending a ton of time arguing about tactics, social networks, and AdWords. Behind the scenes, an even bigger revolution is brewing. It’s the one where entire organizations change in response to the lever of the change in marketing. Henry Ford could have said, “we’re all manufacturers” and been right. Today, we can say, “we’re all marketers,” and we will be just as right.

Every time the deck is reshuffled, the early players profit. You and I don’t have the chance to build a mass-media company ever again. But
every organization has the chance to reinvent and grow in the face of the huge opportunity today’s shift brings.

This sounds hard. It’s not. Once you understand the key forces at work (I figure there are about 14 of them), it’s actually easier to go with the flow than it is to fight it.

This is way too conceptual for a blog post or even a useful book, so I guess I’ll ask the question this way: If you were alive in 1947 and knew what you know now about the last sixty years of mass marketing, what would you have done? What would you have built? Was it just about making better TV commercials?

Google and Discovery

Google and the other search engines have broken the world into little tiny bits. No one visits a website’s home page anymore—they walk in the back door, to just the place Google sent them. By atomizing the world, Google destroys the end-to-end solution offered by most organizations, replacing it with a pick-and-choose, component-based solution.

Columbus is the center of a popular fable about discovery. He set out to find something, got lost along the way, and instead gets credit for an even bigger find. The analogy of the Web is pretty much a stretch, but here goes: people don’t always find you the way you want to be found.

Not only are there literally a million ways to discover you and your offerings, but rarely do people hear your story the way you want it to be heard. The idea of a home page and a site map and a considered, well-lit entryway to your brand is quaint but unrealistic.

I can clone a frog from one skin cell—and get the whole frog.

Can I clone your brand from one interaction, from one Web page, from one referral? Whether I can or not, I will.

That means that bundling is harder than ever.

Bundling was the glue that held together almost every business and organization.

Bundle donations and parcel them out to charities that deserve them. (That’s the United Way.)

Bundle TV shows and present them, with ads, on your TV network.

Bundle the items in your industrial-supplies catalog and hand it to the business buyer.

Bundle 30 businesses and house them in one big office tower.

The Yellow Pages is a multibillion-dollar business that consists of nothing but bundled ads for local businesses. No one wants to keep a flyer for every business in town, but everyone has a copy of the Yellow Pages.

Book publishers bundle authors and share the expertise of their staff, their sales force, and their capital in order to bring books to readers.

We’ve been doing the bundling so long, we forgot we were doing it.

The world just got unbundled. Like it or not, there you are.

Perhaps the biggest change the New Marketing brings is the easiest to overlook, mostly because it’s so obvious.

Every organization now has the ability (and probably the responsibility) to deal directly with the world. With customers, with prospects, and with those affected by their actions. No middlemen.

The president of the bank isn’t used to hearing from a customer about to lose her house. A retailer in Tucson isn’t used to hearing from a potential customer in Nebraska. A rock star is used to being entertained by A&R guys, not by maintaining a permission list of 100,000 customers and 55,000 Myspace friends.

This direct connection is an asset or a risk, depending on how you look at it.

The asset (the only asset, pretty much) that can be built online is permission. The privilege of marketing to people who want to be marketed to. This asset is big enough and valuable enough to build an entire business around (witness Scott Adams and Amazon), and it upsets traditional power structures in just about every industry.

More important, it leads to the idea of “no insulation.”

Sonos makes a device that would have been inconceivable only ten years ago. The Sonos system is a remote control (with an LCD screen), a hard drive, and a box. The box hooks up to your stereo speakers, and the
hard drive holds all your MP3 files. You can use the remote to review your entire music collection and play it anywhere in your house. Add more boxes, add more rooms. One hard drive can be used to let your daughter play Mahler in her room while you listen to Coldplay in the kitchen.

While the idea is simple, and installation is a snap, the products Sonos replaces weren’t simple or easy. As a result, multi-room speaker systems were sold by consultants—the sort of private services that cater to multimillionaires and their homes. At a recent CEDIA show (the conference for installers), one of the categories was “Best Installation over £100,000.”

If you were in that business (as companies like Runco and Stewart Filmscreen were), you catered to the CEDIA installers. You let them be the middlemen, the service and support people, the installers, and yes, the folks that made most of the profit. The installers guided many of the decisions that their clients made, and you were at their mercy.

Sonos sells a product for about a thousand dollars. That’s less than the gratuity on most custom installations. As a result, Sonos decided to use the Web to allow consumers to interact with them directly.

In addition to creating a well-designed discussion board, Sonos invested in motivated, well-trained online staff members, who are seemingly everywhere, answering questions within a few minutes of their being asked. Sonos has pleasant technicians answering the phone on weekends. They not only publish their email address, but actually answer queries (and helpfully) in a matter of hours.

Of course, Sonos is still happy to work with the CEDIA crowd. But by embracing the ideas of accessibility and speed, they have made their product appealing to people who could easily afford to spend ten times as much.

How will their competition catch up? How can their competition simultaneously jettison their entire sales force, dramatically increase the quality of their customer service, lower their end pricing by 70%, and make the product consumer friendly? They can’t.

When everyone was playing by the same rules, when all suppliers relied on insulation in order to maintain margins and keep throughput efficient, it was a terrific system. But as soon as one player in the industry
can use a direct connection to the end consumer, the rules change for everyone.

Everyone is a critic.

One of my dearest friends is Joanne Kates, the restaurant critic for
The Globe and Mail
, the most important newspaper in Toronto. Joanne carries a credit card with someone else’s name on it (I promised I wouldn’t say whose). Despite her precautions, her picture is posted in the kitchen of dozens of top restaurants. Why? Because once a restaurant knows that Joanne is wearing a wig and sitting in the dining room, the staff can influence the review.