Matter/Anti-Matter

Forgive me but I have to plug something my company (Frog Design) is involved in. I'm only doing this because it is such a neat event: In collaboration with Frog, NPR will host a unique Digital Think In this Friday in our offices in San Francisco, bringing together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations.

Hosted by NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and General Manager Kinsey Wilson, the Think In will harness the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators. Participants include leaders at the leading edge of technology and media innovation from academia, venture capital, internet design, public media, social media, and research. Notable participants contributing to the day-long brainstorm include: Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist; Reid Hoffman, Chairman and co-Founder of LinkedIn; Roger McNamee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners; Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer of Mozilla; Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist and creator of Google News; and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, among many others.

The Think In will explore five main topics that are significant to NPR's ecosystem and its future: social media and connection to the audience, the organization's national network of more than 800 stations, the potential of its open API, expansion of platforms, and its diversified revenue model. After an NPR overview and an opening session, participants will break out into small groups to develop concepts that NPR can incorporate into its organizational roadmap.

The event will be live-blogged and the Digital Think In micro-site will feature live video streams of the opening and closing sessions. In addition, attendees will be tweeting the event throughout the day using the hashtag #nprthinkin. NPR's Andy Carvin will be posting to YouTube and Flickr under "nprthink," and updating NPR's Facebook page.

Join the NPR Digital Think In (remotely)

Frog Design's promised series on “Meaning-Driven Business” is taking shape. After introducing the concept of “Chief Meaning Officer” in the “Power” issue of design mind, we are going to formally launch this new forum in our upcoming special TEDGlobal issue (to be released on Sept. 21, 2009) as well as on a special microsite to be launched in a couple of weeks.

For the first round of essays, we are delighted to have received contributions from three industry and thought leaders: Beth Comstock, chief marketing officer of GE and one of the world's most influential Fortune 50 marketing executives, will take the economic crisis as an opportunity to make the case for marketing-driven innovation. Werner Bauer, Nestle's chief technology officer and head of innovation, will describe his company’s concept of “Shared Value” and how it enables a more socially responsible business. And Dev Patnaik, founder and chief executive of innovation consultancy Jump Associates and author of the book Wired to Care, will illustrate how “high-empathy organizations” of all kinds prosper when they tap into a power each of us already has: the ability to reach outside of ourselves and connect with other people. Stay tuned!

The conversation is continuing in other outlets, too, and some pundits want “meaning” to not only be an abstract concept, but a movement. Economist Umair Haque is one of them. His "Generation M (as in “meaning”) Manifesto" stirred some controversial reactions (just read the comments on his blog)--from unconditional endorsement to accusations of arrogance and naiveté. It is one out of many manifestos that have recently been published on the new “new economy”--this, too, is a sign of the times. Manifestos indicate an increased need for ideological alternatives – and meaning. ... Read more

Forgive this self-serving plug but I think this is worth sharing: My colleague, Frog Design founder and former CEO, Hartmut Esslinger, has written his first book, and it is available in stores now: A Fine Line - How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business. Part autobiography, part how-to innovation guide, part outlook to the future of design, A Fine Line is "a must-read for designers and business people alike" (Satjiv Chahil, senior vice president, Hewlett-Packard).

A Fine Line offers a step-by-step overview of the innovation process -- from targeting goals to shepherding new products and services to the marketplace -- in order to reveal how to arrive at an authentic human design that connects strongly with consumers. With a unique perspective, rich stories, and a global mindset, Hartmut Esslinger explores business solutions that are environmentally sustainable and contribute to an enduring global economy.

Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital, in his foreword, said it all: "Hartmut's book contains the ruminations of a man who has devoted his life to the challenge of marrying the aesthetic with the functional while standing firm against the deadening forces of mediocrity. His work shows that taste can triumph, design and production can be soul-mates, and the eye of an individual can shape a product and a company. The idea that finely designed products can change the fate of companies while also becoming our indispensable companions is a message that millions of us owe to Hartmut."

You can find the table of contents, sample chapters, testimonials, and videos on http://www.afinelinebook.com

And here are some excerpts from a video interview with Hartmut:

A somewhat unconventional yet challenging task: Newsweek invited four "hot (and nonpartisan) design firms" to provide ideas and design direction for "resurrecting the Republican brand," featured in this week's (December 29) print issue. The full-page feature presents concepts by frog design (full disclosure: my employer), Pentagram, Razorfish, and The Groop.

The article is not available online so check it out at a news stand (and support print media!).

“Motivating the committed outperforms persuading the uncommitted” (Seth Godin)

Now that we have a President-elect Obama, it’s time to reflect on how this was possible. The Web is full of thoughtful analyses that examine Obama’s victory as one made possible through state-of-the-art marketing--from Tomi T. Ahonen’s “For a We species, a We president: Yes we can,” to John Quech’s “How Better Marketing Elected Barack Obama” in Harvard Business Online, to Seth Godin’s "Marketing Lessons from the US Election," to The New York Times and, of course, the all-inclusive, behind-the-scenes "How He Did It" account in Newsweek.

Yet Obama’s victory is not only a victory through marketing, it is also a victory for marketing, for the profession as a whole. It restored America’s political capital but also America’s reputation as the spiritual home of marketing. It proved all those wrong who asserted the end of American brands and branding in general, and it has given more ammunition to marketers who passionately believe that smart marketing can indeed change the world. And so it goes that I am not only a happy American this week but also a happy marketer.

Every history of marketing must also be a history of America--see the TV series Mad Men--and one might even posit that America’s history is a history of marketing. Seth Godin describes it this way: “The lesson that society should take away about all marketing is a simple one. When you buy a product, you're also buying the marketing. Buy something from a phone telemarketer, you get more phone telemarketers, guaranteed. Buy a gas guzzler and they'll build more. Marketers are simple people...they make what sells. Our culture has purchased (and voted) itself into the place we are today.” Arthur Miller put this more optimistically when he said: “America’s biggest asset is its promise.” The same can be said about marketing.

“Change we can believe in” is the motto of each and every transaction between a brand and its consumers

The Obama campaign leveraged its promise with maximum effect: “Change we can believe in” is the motto of each and every transaction between a brand and its consumers. Buying or buying in always implies the expectation of a positive change--a change in someone’s well being, household, and financial situation or at any other levels of Maslow’s pyramid. But with “Change” as the ultimate promise and “Hope” as the ultimate motivation, the Obama campaign didn’t just generate leads, it created believers. The 7 million names on its lists (e-mail addresses, mobile phone numbers, Facebook and MySpace pages) represent a staggering 11 percent of the approximately 64 million votes the president-elect received. The loyalty of these supporters is of long-term value. Tomi T. Ahonen writes: “The Obama presidency can continue to engage with this active part of his core supporters, return to them at the re-election bid, and even use this support base to help in the elections of his successor in 2016 (assuming Obama is re-elected in 2012).” And in fact, Obama and team are not wasting any time and launched a new site, change.gov, right after the election to keep in touch with existing and new supporters during the transition.

All of this illustrates the power of community and provides further evidence that identity trumps utility. A great brand is one that diverts attention away from itself and toward an even greater purpose. That’s exactly what Obama did for the Generation O, which was in it to make history and be part of a movement, a new "we species” with Obama as its first we president.” Combine this political tribalism with an unprecedented level of open-sourced participation, and you have a powerful collaborative platform that outperforms that of any opponent. Obama won because his supporters were more passionate, more dedicated, and more engaged. And it didn’t hurt that he was a candidate they loved.

But what makes the Obama campaign truly unique is how it complemented its open community nature with remarkable on-message rigor. While large components of the action were decentralized, the campaign headquarters provided the central discipline needed to align them when necessary. For the most part it was not, and it felt as if an unwritten code, an impressive self-discipline had ensured notable collective focus and the absence of any drama on the trail.

Disciplined Decentralism

This “Disciplined Decentralism,” as you might call it, is the major takeaway for marketers from the election. It was the foundation of a nationwide (and even global, if you consider the “moral” vote from non-U.S. citizens around the world) campaign that became the first in an age of audience fragmentation to succeed in not only raising maximum awareness for a hitherto unknown brand, but also bringing about radical behavioral change. It has restored the American soft power overnight, as Joseph Nye noted, and it has also rebuilt marketer confidence. Can we marketers orchestrate social media, amateur content, and crowd-sourced platforms with utmost message discipline on a large scale? Yes, we can. Can we reconcile authenticity and consistency? Yes, we can. Can we combine traditional broadcasting ads with low-fi video clips without diluting the message? Yes we can. Can we be our own media channel and bypass media without alienating them? Yes we can. Can we design campaigns that cultivate the small in the big and the big in the small, in other words, campaigns that use direct marketing (phone banking, fundraising) but use them bottom-up and not top-down? Yes we can. Can we be hyper-targeted and still be inclusive and reach out to everyone? Yes we can.

Marketing for the people, with the people, and by the people

Obama has radically altered the marketing playbook, and the astonishing rise of the brand Obama is a template for all marketers from this point on: Weaving together data and human intelligence, collective wisdom and individual charisma, strategic calculus and enthusiasm, the Obama campaign has re-established marketing as marketing for the people, with the people, and by the people. When charismatic leadership meets organizational prowess meets community, the result is marketing that is truly presidential.

In this new age of "radical transparency," British firm Garlik has unveiled a new way to gauge popularity on the internet. The "QDOS" digital status rating system factors in how many times a person's name appears in a search, as well as a person's popularity, impact, and activity, among other criteria. Garlik's system plays on the phenomenon of "vanity searches:" googling" and comparing oneself to others. I couldn't resist the temptation: My QDOS score is Q3176 -- that's less than Nelson Mandela (Q6624) and Woody Allen (Q7764) but more than "Home and Away" star Paul O'Brian (Q2929). Yay! Other interesting comparisons: Pope Benedikt (Q6889) scores higher than the Dalai Lama (Q5749). And Barack Obama (Q9983) trails Ron Paul (Q10233)...

Garlik plans using its system to eventually guide people into investing in identity protection services. This is an interesting strategy that we will see more often: creating a service as a value-added teaser to in fact market another, commercially more viable service. Let's dub this "proxy marketing." Want to promote a product? Launch another (free) product! That way, you build awareness, goodwill, and a community of users that you can then implicitly educate on the value proposition of your actual offering. Sooner or later, they'll be ready to open their wallet.

Another recent example of this strategy is Ideablob, the much hyped crowdsourced idea-sharing site, which essentially is a proxy service run by Advanta, one of the largest credit card companies in the US. DEMO judged: "By providing the more than 25 million small business owners in the U.S. with an interactive environment for advice, counsel, and idea exchange, Advanta is defining the power of community in its truest sense." Ideablob touts itself as "a place to grow your ideas" but it may in fact be a means to grow Advanta's client base.

Of course "marketing by proxy" isn't really a new thing as marketers have always partnered with other "proxy" third-party services to move into markets where they had only limited expertise and brand elasticity. And yet, what's new is that marketers seem to become more aggressive in marketing the proxy product itself. Proxy and actual product are often under one and the same corporate roof, and the boundaries between them are blurring. Smart marketers think of proxy strategies as win-win's, designing the proxy product to ideally become its own profit center.

Robert Stephens, founder and chief inspector of The Geek Squad, contends that "Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable." Does marketing smell bad? Or is it perhaps even dead? There have been a number of articles recently that question the marketer's ability to make sense of his/her somewhat wishy-washy role. BusinessWeek reveled in the "short life of the CMO," and McKinsey Quarterly provided some stats that reveal how much today's marketing executives are grappling with the new social media environment, arguing that "many chief marketers still have narrowly defined roles that emphasize advertising, brand management, and market research." No wonder even marketing guru Seth Godin has turned negative and asks in his new book whether "your marketing is out of sync."

Clearly, marketing needs some serious marketing. Conferences that seek to redefine (and thus strengthen) marketing's role are therefore burgeoning: The American Marketing Association offers seminars such as "Beyond Marketing 2.0: Harnessing the Power of Social Media for Marketing Campaign Results," Forrester's Marketing Forum 2008 heralds "engagement" as the profession's "new imperative for success," and the humbly titled THE Conference on Marketing (well, I guess it makes sense if you consider marketing the function of superlatives) aspires to be the penultimate forum for marketing leaders who "seek certainty in experimental times." In the meantime, Seth Godin has it all figured out and presents "14 trends marketers need to embrace to avoid eating meatball sundaes" (via BNET).

On paper, Godin's recommendations may sound all too familiar for marketing experts, but in reality they are still a hard sell to many CEOs. Marketers, although typically the early adopters in their organizations, are after all slow movers within the constraints of their mandates. Marketers have always been under scrutiny for what they do -- now they have also gotten under scrutiny for what they are. It is therefore all the more surprising that it is good old McKinsey which endorses broadening the marketer's role, envisioning him/her as a "strategic activist:"

"As companies confront changing consumer behavior, increasingly important third-party scrutiny, and more diverse target markets and segments, they must broaden the roles of marketing and the CMO. Today, many chief marketers focus mainly on building brands, making advertising more effective, and perhaps market research. Although these responsibilities aren't going away, CMOs must address several other areas as well: leading company-wide change in response to evolving buying patterns, stepping up efforts to shape a company's public profile, managing complexity, and building new marketing capabilities throughout the company as a whole. The relative importance of these new priorities will of course vary by company and industry, but the broad importance of reinventing the CMO's role as a strategic activist is similar across them."

According to a Conference Board global survey, execution is CEOs' No. 1 concern--even ranking above profit and top-line growth.

769 CEOs from 40 countries were asked to rate their greatest concerns from among 121 challenges. The polled CEOs selected "excellence of execution" as the top challenge and "keeping consistent execution of strategy by top management" as the third-greatest concern. Sustained and steady top-line growth, which led the list last year, now ranks second, with profit growth fourth and finding qualified managerial talent fifth.

The survey responses reveal some remarkable regional differences. CEOs from Europe expressed greater concern with getting new, more responsive ideas out sooner, which may be why execution--in terms of speed, flexibility and adaptability to change--is a more dominant theme in Europe (third place) than in Asia (tied for eighth) and in the United States (10th place).

Management's focus on innovation comes and goes in cycles. Right now, it is all the rage again (although it remains to be seen if that's still the case as innovation budgets may be cut when the looming recession hits the US), and the business press is covering it all across the board. Managing innovation is one of the most critical tasks companies face, and yet it remains one of the biggest challenges. Not only do companies need to come up with new ideas, but they also need to nurture a culture that consistently encourages and rewards innovation. If they don't, well, then they may be the next Dell or Motorola -- both companies had gained major competitive advantages as the result of major break-through innovations (Dell with process, Motorola with design) but failed to follow-up on their successes with new innovations and instead focused solely on most efficiently exploiting their one "big idea."

It's the old antagonism between excellence and efficiency that is at play here, and along with it, the conundrum of creativity versus process. In a recent issue, BusinessWeek questions the value of Six Sigma, the Holy Grail of process (and performance) optimization in which many corporate heavyweights fervently believe. The Six Sigma methodology, with its emphasis on quality management, was once understood to be a strong innovation enabler. However, as competitive advantages are increasingly built upon top-line growth, in other words, explorative rather than exploitative strategies, it suddenly seems to be a little dusty. Six Sigma was developed to minimize risk and variation, but for free-spirited innovation to blossom, allowing risk and variation is paramount.

Process-obsession may in fact be opposed to the new age of creativity that propels hyper-customization and attempts to save brands from the death spiral of commoditization. If you measure everything you manage, risky ideas will not spark. Employees need to be able to dream, and they need to know that their company not only encourages risk but in fact exhibits a high tolerance for failure. Culture is key. A risk-taking environment, an open-source conversation with internal and external contributors, and a high agility to develop ideas, test them (and sometimes fail with them) are the main attributes of truly innovative organizations.

Gary Hamel, professor at the London Business School and "management innovator without peer" (Financial Times), argues along the same lines in his new book "The Future of Management" (excerpt published in Fortune). He understands the importance of organization-wide innovation and contends that the reigning management paradigm -- efficiency above excellence -- discourages innovation and is in fact an outdated model that needs an innovative overhaul itself: "Most of the essential tools and techniques of modern management were invented by individuals born in the 19th century, not long after the end of the American Civil War. (...) Now think back over the past 20 or 30 years of management history. Can you identify a dozen innovations on the scale of those that laid the foundations of modern management? I can't. Our Industrial Age management model is languishing out at the far end of the S-curve and may be reaching the limits of its improvability."

Referring to the cases of Whole Foods, W.L. Gore, and Google, Hamel prescribes radical decentralization, flatter hierarchies, more incentives for employees at all levels, and stronger ties between results and recognition: "The sooner your company starts sloughing off its legacy management beliefs, the sooner it's going to become truly fit for the future. As we've seen, a few companies are already traveling light, having left a lot of their outdated management baggage back there in the 20th century. In the end, there's really not much of a choice: You can either wait for tomorrow's management heretics to beat the orthodoxies out of your company, or you can start coaxing them out right now."