PyroMarketing

The Illusion of Knowledge

I just began reading The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin.  Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress Emeritus, Nobel Prize-Winning historian and author of numerous books, wrote The Discoverers as a "History of man's search to know his world and himself."  Beginning with the discovery of time, Boorstin not only chronicles man's great discoveries but also...

"Those illusions--about the earth, the continents and the seas before Columbus and Balboa, about the heavens before Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler, and about the human body before Paracelsus and Vesalius and Harvey, about plants and animals before Ray and Linnaeus, Darwin and Pasteur, about the past before Petrarch and Winckelmann, Thomsen and Schliemann, about wealth before Adam Smith and Keynes, about the physical world and the atom before Newton and Dalton and Faraday, Clerk Maxwell and Einstein."

These "illusions of knowledge"--everything we were so sure we already knew--were, in many ways, the greatest obstacles to discovery.  Not only did they dull our curiosity and temper our ambition, in some cases they created real, violent opposition to the discoverer's quest for the truth from his or her contemporaries.

I take comfort from this.  Perhaps it means I'm on to something.

What "illusions of knowledge" plague us today?  Which certainties are currently thwarting discovery?  I plan to search my own heart as I read the book.  I'm certain I'm blinded by many assumptions.  I encourage you to do the same.  It seems a good time for us all to adopt Boorstin's attitude that, as he says in his note to the reader, "This is a story without end.  All the world is still an America.  The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita--unknown territory."

Spread the fire. GS

Kleenex Let's It Out

The new Let It Out campaign from Kleenex exhibits some nice PyroMarketing traits.

Kleenex realized that people use tissues when experiencing emotions.  We laugh till we cry.  We cry till we cry. Then found a way to leverage that truth while harnessing the power of the crowd to draw attention to its product.

The brand's website lets people express what they're feeling by leaving short stories or uploading expressive photos, experience what others are feeling by touring their contributions, and offer encouragement by "giving Kleenex tissues" (voting) for stories or photos they found compelling.  It's a nice way to engage consumers around a trialogue.

Touch, touch, touch, feel.
The print campaign also found a nice way to touch consumers with the match.  The current issue of Oprah's O magazine features an ad that dispenses tissues.  Rather than trying to describe the "new soothing sensation" of its tissues with lotion, Kleenex found a way to let consumers experience it.

How could consumers experience your product or service?  Spread the fire. GS

Living your brand vs. preserving your brand

Instead of trying to preserve or protect your brand, make it your goal to live your brand instead.

An organization I was working with was planning a series of radio station remotes at its various locations.  It sent a document to participating stations that listed the things its personnel were prohibited from doing during the remote.  Most of the rules restricted the station's access to the "brand's customers."  Unfortunately, this also restricted the station's impact. 

The brand took these steps because it wanted to protect its brand image and it was afraid that the radio staff's interactions with customers might not reinforce (or could even conflict) with the image it wanted to portray. They reasoned that patrons already had a fixed brand image in their minds and that contact with the radio people only risked screwing it up.  This approach missed an opportunity to reinforce the brand and also made the radio people feel like second class citizens.

In reality, brand images are never fixed.  They are dynamic and evolve with each and every brand contact.  Trying to create a particular brand image and then preserve it by preventing further change is futile since it would require, among other things, that your customers have no further contact with the brand!

Instead, why not try to reinforce an appropriate brand image at every opportunity by actively living your brand?

Rather than hiding the radio people from its customers, this organization should have taught the radio people how to properly represent the brand.  It should have taught them how the brand values its customers.  It should have trained them the way it trained its own employees.  This would have taken extra effort, but it would have allowed the radio people to further reinforce the brand's true image while also making them better brand evangelists by convincing them of the company's commitment to its customers.

Are you trying to protect your brand?  What would it mean to live it instead?  Spread the fire. GS

Are you responding to the rate of change?

Things are changing.  What's more, the rate at which they are changing is faster than it's ever been.  It might be a good time to pause and rethink areas of life that we take for granted.

To understand what I mean, consider the history of visual entertainment.

The Greeks invented theater in the 5th century.  Live actors playing their parts endured as the primary form of theatrical entertainment from 400 AD until April 23, 1896 when the first movie was projected onto the wall of the Koster and Bial's Music Hall on 34th Street in New York. 

The first Blockbuster video store opened in Brooklyn, New York on November 5, 1985 and for the next two decades we rented movies from stores and watched them at home. 

Netflix launched in 1997 changing the model yet again.  Instead of driving to the store to rent a movie, Netflix shipped the movies we rented to our homes.  Then, in 2007, and thanks largely to adequate broadband penetration, Netflix began allowing its subscribers to stream unlimited movies.  No more physical product at all.  We borrowed electrons instead.

So, let's review. 

• Plays dominated for almost 1500 years--about 20 lifetimes!
• Movie theaters dominated for almost 100 years--about 2.5x the average career span.
• Movie rental stores dominated for about 20 years--about half the average career span.
• Movies physically shipped to your home dominated for almost 10 years--about on quarter the average career span.
• Movies streamed via the Internet have just begun and will last for, well, we don't know how long, but given the trend is 5 years an outrageous guess?

My grandfather graduated with his engineering degree from Michigan State University and went to work for Dow Chemical where he spent his entire working life before retiring around age 65.  But today, entire industries come and go in less time than it takes to earn a bachelor's degree.  What happened to carburetor manufacturers?  Where, pray tell, is the Iomega Zip Drive?

Think about it, some business is booming when you enter college and gone before you graduate.  And to think some of my friends had a hard time choosing their major when I was in school.  Imagine the difficulty now.

The Impact
The increasing rate of change affects more than movies.  You can see something close to this model at work almost everywhere.  And it's creating some real problems.  No matter the industry, the earlier model is also the one that lasted for the longest period of time. This...

• Tricks many into confusing longevity for permanence, causing them to stop expecting change and take their eyes off the horizon.
• Leads us to invest lots of time and resources into the earliest models.  This makes them harder to abandon. Many start thinking it is their job to preserve the status quo rather than understand and adapt to change.  History is littered with corpses of those martyred for that futile cause.
• Finally, it may cause us to over estimate how long the new model will last which, in turn, can lead us to repeat the first two mistakes.

What Should Change?
So, what are those things we take for granted that should be rethought in light of this?

How about college?  In the old model you would graduate from high school, get a bachelor's degree in your chosen field, enter the work force and spend about 40 years working before you retired.  But if industries come and go in five years, does that model still make sense?  Should we begin to explore alternatives?

• Education/Work Cycles: Earn a liberal arts degree and a brief specialization before entering the work force for ten years.  Then, return to college, revising your skills to better adapt to the changed work environment.  Repeat this cycle four to six times over the course of your career.  Each time you would work fewer years before returning to school.  Instead of retirement packages, employers would fund "re-education" accounts designed to help pay for school and living expenses when the employee returned for another round of schooling.
• Combing Education with Work: Rather than paying tens of thousands to universities before repaying student loans with the salary from your first job, why not design training into entry-level work roles.  Employers could pay reduced salaries to workers-in-training and the employee would still enjoy a net increase compared to the high cost of college.  Accreditation programs could ensure proper training.  Employers would compete based on pay, work environment, and also their ability to educate their people.

What do you think we should reconsider in light of the rapid rate of change?  Spread the fire. GS

Want to motivate people to action? Good news: Optimism beats pessimism.

Ultimately, marketing is about motivating people to take some action, so marketers take heed.  Optimism trumps pessimism. Encouraging people to follow you to paradise is much more effective than, say, trying to scare them out of hell by scaring the hell out of them.

I was reminded of this yesterday when a relative forwarded one of "those emails."  This particular message chronicled every misstep in the four-week-old Obama administration. The sender hoped the letter might rally me (and everyone else on the long routing list) to action.  Maybe I'd call my congressman or write a scathing letter to the editor.  Perhaps I'd forward the email so my dearest friends could share in the doom and despair.  Instead, I slumped in my chair, paralyzed.

Pessimism depresses people.  Depressed people feel helpless and hopeless.  They lose their will to live, let alone the will to draft a clever note to their Senator.  Pessimism makes people less able to act by creating a sense of hopelessness that makes their actions seem futile.  What's more, the email made its sender seem impotent.  The subliminal message was, "I'm helpless and frustrated and the only thing I can do is forward depressing emails.  Join me!"

Ah, but then there's optimism.

“I will not stand by and watch this great country destroy itself under mediocre leadership that drifts from one crisis to the next, eroding our national will and purpose."  said Ronald Reagan as he accepted his party's nomination amid economic turmoil and voter pessimism. "The time is now, my fellow Americans, to recapture our destiny, to take it into our own hands.” 

Reagan painted a glorious picture of what could be, rallied the world to action and moved mountains-- overcoming communism and ending the Cold War--nothing, it seemed, was impossible. 

In your marketing and in life, shift your focus from what's wrong with today to what's possible tomorrow and you'll inspire people to join your cause.

Spread the fire. GS

Metcalfe's Law and Choosing a Dentist

So what's the best way to choose a banker, a real estate agent or an attorney these days? There was a time when their skill as a lender, a seller of property, or a negotiator of deals was all that mattered.  But over lunch today, my friend Ed Brenegar, his son Stewart and I discussed another, interesting possibility. 

Does the size of a person's social network make them more valuable? 

Would you choose one dentist over another because they had more Facebook friends?  Would you select a banker because they had more LinkedIn contacts than their competitor?  Maybe you should.

Metcalfe's Law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users.  Metcalfe's Law is true of human social networks as well, so the value of our personal social network is enhanced when we add connected users.  That means that, given equal dentistry abilities, the dentist with 300 LinkedIn connections is a far better choice than the one with 3.

In a marketplace desperate to find every competitive edge I wonder whether service providers will begin advertising the size of their network while offering to friend you if you patronize them?

Spread the fire. GS

The Red Carpet to Ruin

Chris Brown is getting more publicity today for failing to perform at the Grammy's and allegedly assaulting his girlfriend Rihanna, than he probably would have gained by actually performing.  To perform at the Grammy's would have subjected him to comparisons with Al Green and that might not have gone so well. Better skip it for the police blotter so you can be the lead story.

Christian Bale unleashes a profanity-laced tirade on the set of his new film and news media scramble to cover it.  Interestingly, his tirade occurred last July, but reports--and even audio recordings--are only now surfacing, just in time to help promote the movie's May release.

And have you ever noticed that most pop star's rehab appearances often happen between new CD releases when they would otherwise be absent from the news?

Call me cynical, but I believe many such stories reported as "news" are actually premeditated, highly calculated publicity stunts and I suspect that mainstream media, desperate to reverse plummeting ratings are often willing accomplices, You give us the salacious story we covet and we'll give you the publicity you desire. Wink, wink.

Unfortunately, Generation Y, whose stated goal is to become rich and famous, may follow Brown's or Bale's or Britteny's example and see violence, broken commitments, foul language, and substance abuse as the path.

Spread the fire. GS

Fast Action Plan

Today I'll speak at the Lakeshore Leadership Luncheon Series in Zeeland Michigan.  I'll tell them about changes that have occurred in the marketplace and introduce them to PyroMarketing as a new, more effective way, to reach the right people with news of their products.

I won't have as much time as I usually get and won't be able to cover as much application information as I'd like.  To compensate, I created a PyroMarketing Fast Action Plan with seventeen simple steps the audience can take to create the beginnings of a PyroMarketing plan for their business.  I thought you might appreciate it too, so here it is.

Download Fastactionsteps