INTRODUCTION

WHAT IF?

Adventure may hurt, but monotony will kill you.

—AUTHOR UNKNOWN

WHAT IF? THAT is the question you need to ask and answer—multiple times every single day. The solution to every problem begins with this question.

The best marketers don’t ask either/or questions. They don’t seek answers to questions such as: “Transactions or relationships?” “High touch or high tech?” “Purpose or profit?” “Size or speed?” There is no doubt that we all must make difficult choices in executing brand strategy. But it’s no longer about giving up something that is important to you and your customers. In many cases, asking “What if?” helps you find new ways to navigate an ill-defined obstacle course.

TOUGH MUDDER: AN OBSTACLE COURSE FOR DECISION MAKING

What if I asked you to run through the woods on a muddy trail with me? That’s exactly what my co worker Laurel Geisbush asked me to do in 2013 when I arrived at Microsoft. But this wasn’t your average mud run. This was an obstacle and endurance course created by two Harvard Business School students, Guy Livingstone and Will Dean. Its name? Tough Mudder.

Tough Mudder is a great analogy for the world we occupy as marketers. The demanding physical course features several decisionmaking scenarios requiring the traverser to work creatively and collaboratively to be successful. To the unacquainted, the obstacle course can be a mare’s nest of irrational decision making, whether there is one leader everyone follows or if everyone attempts the course on his or her own. That’s the point. What the organizers want you to do is to make decisions—many of them uncomfortable—quickly and spontaneously.

In Tough Mudder, groups that think obstacles through “on the fly” benefit from using a “What if” rather than an “Either/or” decision-making process, although several of the obstacles require a straight linear-thought trajectory.

The Biggest Obstacle: Consumers in Control

Shaping business around real customer behavior is the challenge facing us as marketers today. It’s our version of Tough Mudder. Unfortunately, companies are still built and structured to solve linear, twentieth-century marketing issues. The marketing skills that used to work splendidly are incompatible with today’s world.

Phillipa Reed, director at Think Big Social, in London, defined the current situation brilliantly when she wrote about brands in a thought-leadership piece for LinkedIn: “There is an increasing trend away from consumers simply being influenced by brands, to the point where brands are now increasingly being controlled and influenced by their consumers.”

The primary driver of this distinct trend is the influence that social networks, smartphones, apps, online forums, and blogs have had on how we live our lives. The continuing takeover by digital media has ushered in the reimagination of the roles once controlled by brand strategists, media buyers, advertising agencies, brands, and marketing departments. While customers were once subject to the whim of brand messages, they now can act as media creators, publishers, producers, and critics. In other words, brands have less control than ever before and must be willing to adapt to this newfound reality.

Ask yourself:

What if we developed messages as marketers that had nothing to do with stories, but more to do with social responsibility?

What if we decided to ditch all the ways we as marketers have tried to improve brand perception via impression-based metrics and instead looked to other metrics such as sentiment as a guide for our efforts?

What if we disrupt revenue models gained from conventional practices like media buying and advertising for more nonconventional practices like customer relationship management (CRM) and customer design and development of new products?

Sounds easy and dangerous at the same time, doesn’t it? Well, for some of you it may be too dangerous, which is one reason marketing is stagnating. In my opinion, mainstream marketing is not changing to reflect rapidly evolving customer behavior.

The Biggest Problem: Sticking to the Old Ways of Solving Problems

One of the biggest problems in business is the unwillingness to come up with new ways to creatively solve problems. In the agency world where I spent most of my career, people are always trying to solve problems. Customer-experience problems, client problems, design problems, technology problems. Yet, most work in the twenty-first century will revolve around problem solving. Why? Because the world is complex. We face a number of hurdles that non-imaginative and non-people-centric problem-solving models will have a hard time addressing.

Too many businesses treat customer problems as employee problems. Because employees are not able to solve a customer’s problem, they blame it on the employee’s incompetence, instead of looking for new solutions. They are unwilling to try different things to solve the customer’s issues. And the cycle goes on and on.

Why is that? I believe that in part it’s the consultants to whom businesses turn for answers. Most business books, for example, are written by professionals who hide behind their MBA or 30 years of experience as if they were badges of honor, when in fact the indicators of success that we used to take for granted are now irrelevant, thanks to data and indirect knowledge. As a result, books and blogs with rigidly defined, step-by-step, linear solutions may seem helpful but can actually be harmful in the real business world. Their assumptions are incorrect because they are centered on methodology and technology, not on people.

Solving problems by asking the “What if” question is more helpful because it takes people into consideration rather than simply following a set of pre established resolution blueprints. For every problem you are trying to solve, you should be asking more questions. The Socratic method is as popular as ever in a liberal arts education because it helps develop critical thinking skills that are so needed in the business world—including marketing—for the twenty-first century.

CASE IN POINT

What if I told you that computer programmers are not all nerds, outcasts, or misogynistic brogrammers; that I know and work on a daily basis with especially smart and creative women; that all marketers are not alike; that it’s a diverse field and many are adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, pioneers, and artists?

CODE: IT’S NOT JUST FOR NERDS

Many of us are biased in thinking that computer programmers are a bunch of backroom geeks who don’t step outside the rigid confines of defined languages and stereotypes. But if computer programmers lived in a vacuum, would we have all the unique and innovative applications many of us use to conduct more productive lives?

Back in 2011, when I joined Ogilvy & Mather as a vice president of digital strategy, I learned a minimal amount about how to code. In 2009, my old agency colleague Dominic Basulto, who currently is the innovation blogger for the Washington Post, said it would be important for everyone, whether in tech or teaching, in the military or working for a nonprofit, to learn code.

Code, he said, is the language of the future, enabling us to “make things.” I took his advice, and when my oldest daughter was around two years old, I started a Ruby on Rails class at codeacademy.com. I wanted to go beyond being simply a thinker and become a maker. While learning code, I realized that in the twenty-first century, programming and marketing are both creative and mechanical exercises and are more alike than many of us are led to believe.

People unfamiliar with coding think you just follow simple rules and, boom, you have a solution or an app, that magically works on your iPhone or Surface tablet or Chromebook. The same can be said about marketing. That sentence I used to describe programmers? Let me recite it again: Adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, pioneers, and artists. Yet that description doesn’t simply apply to the average computer programmer; it also applies to a segment of outcasts and outsider marketers: data punks, designers, and creative hybrids.

This segment can’t be defined by their marketing roles because they can do it all: crunch code, write stories, and produce and distribute video content using paid search and social media. Some call them growth hackers. I call them disruptive marketers.

ADAPT OR DIE

The analogy that may best explain business in the twenty-first century is biology, the study of life and living organisms, including their growth and evolution. Think of business as a living, breathing animal. How it adapts or fails to adapt is a major determiner of its survival.

With that in mind, let’s return to my original question. What if we had some data about the fictitious new product that our company was about to ship, and I said: “Don’t tell me who the target audience is. Instead, pull a piece of data that contradicts your normal view of the world and then tell me how the product could be marketed based on that unique data.”

Quick, think back to what I just said about tests. This isn’t a multiple-choice quiz, is it? No, this is a blue book examination.

DISRUPTIVE MARKETING

Allows you to see things others cannot because they can’t separate themselves from their innate biases—that is, what they perceive as “the right kind of marketing” and what might be unchartered territory as defined by the data.

Makes it okay for you to be curious, to daydream, to be enthusiastically inefficient, and to allow your mind to wander and tinker with inconvenient facts.

Is about not following the rules of conventional marketing but, rather, establishing your own rules because the new norms of the creative economy demand it.

Questions everything you learned from primary school to business school because linear patterns don’t make up the real world we inhabit or the one we must create as a result of technology-inspired behavior.

Does not explain away data-centricities with excuses like “bad batch of data,” “small sample size,” “not enough data,” and “that’s not our target audience because I have an innate bias that it shouldn’t be.”

Understands the allure of conventional marketing and the challenge of leaving it behind to forge a new path using disruptive thinking and actions. But the latter can unlock opportunities usually hidden right in front of us that the former is reluctant to identify.

Is for those who inspired it: data punks, designers, creative hybrids, growth hackers, bandits, delinquents, and business rebels of all shapes and sizes who will reconfirm your knowledge so you can help bring it to others in your organization, whatever the objectives (tech products, consumer packaged goods, industrial design products, innovative ideas, politics, new ways of thinking, philosophies) and whatever you would like to apply it to.

Helps empower everyone through a rapid and radical time of business turbulence, when if you don’t lead the change and transformation, others—in this case your customers—will lead it for you.

Rewards those who find and seek new opportunities in creative ways because they have more diligence than intelligence.

Helps overcome preconceived ideas about what makes marketing work by testing and trying things that are smaller, subtler, and more immersive yet more effective than million-dollar campaigns by big companies like Nike and Coca-Cola.

Is for thinkers, doers, questioners, and subversive naysayers who realize the most lethal phrase in business is, “But we’ve always done it this way.”

Doesn’t necessarily have to be related to revenue. In fact, you’ll read later in this book why revenue is a poor target for survival.

THE DE–DON DRAPERIZATION OF MARKETING

What exactly does this new world look like? Well, it is a converged world full of large and tiny touch screens, data as insight, people yearning for experiences and meaning rather than consuming things, and an emerging “do it yourself” collaborative and remixed economy powered by user-generated content, production, design, and feelings, with a heavy emphasis on a company’s reputation and culture instead of monetary capital. In other words, everything you’ve come to learn about what makes efficient or successful marketing is actually inefficient and incorrect.

Marketing today doesn’t look very different from how it has for the last half century, nor has it truly disrupted itself inside and out mainly because of the attitude of marketers and advertising agencies. No industry disrupts itself. That’s why it’s important we look at how people other than those who call themselves marketers behave. I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing several of them for this book and what they have to say will help you prepare for the new normal.

Advertising agencies are also difficult to trust for innovative answers or solutions because, in wanting to stay the course that had historically made money rather than charting a new future, they made the biggest mistake in modern business: they defended themselves instead of going forth and conquering. As a result, agencies blew four opportunities to remain relevant:

1. They missed the digital train. They ignored the dotcom industry, thinking it would go bust.

2. They ignored search engines because they didn’t ask “What if” questions about where the world could be headed with smartphones and location-based technology.

3. They ignored social media marketing because they thought people would only use search engines and platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn wouldn’t ever be as big as the “big media” of cable and network television.

4. They were late to the content-marketing game because they didn’t understand why people used the social web and Internet in the first place. It was hardly to make friends with brands; it really was a place to connect and learn.

Agencies missed these four trends and will continue to miss many more because of the group-think and conformity embedded in their DNA.

What agencies failed to realize is that marketing is more than messaging. It’s more than advertising. It’s more than broadcasting. It’s more than simply return on investment (ROI). Agencies also failed to realize that marketing isn’t devoid of math anymore. Nor should math reduce creativity to a Post-it note on a social platform instructing visitors to “read more,” “learn more,” “download more,” or “watch more.” People aren’t responsive to what sounds like commands from a military general.

If anything, math makes marketing more creative, not less. Marketing in a disruptive sense is the way we all can and should use data to build more meaningful products, create alliances to solve the world’s most daunting problems, get people to adopt new ways of thinking, solve customer problems, and rethink how business and possibly the economy will operate differently in the next decade.

Even David Ogilvy, one of the godfathers of advertising and the inspiration for Don Draper’s character in the cable television show Mad Men, knew that data would be more relevant than creative efforts alone. Ogilvy was as much a futurist in this area as anyone else. To me, he was one of the first disruptive marketers. It’s a shame his beliefs don’t resonate in our world as much as they should. When reading the following passage, replace Ogilvy’s phrase “direct response” with “disruptive marketing”:

In the advertising community today there are two worlds. Your world of direct response advertising and that other world, that world of general advertising. These two worlds are on a collision course. You direct response people know what kind of advertising works and what doesn’t work. You know to a dollar. The general advertising people don’t know. You know that two-minute commercials on television are more effective, more cost-effective than 10-second commercials or 30-second commercials. You know that fringe time on television sells more than prime time. In print advertising, you know that long copy sells more than short copy. You know that headlines and copy about the product and its benefits sell more than cute headlines and poetic copy. You know to a dollar. The general advertisers and their agencies know almost nothing for sure because they cannot measure the results of their advertising. They worship at the altar of creativity. Which really means originality. The most dangerous word in the lexicon of advertising. They opine that 30-second commercials are more cost-effective than two-minute commercials. You know they’re wrong. In print advertising, they opine that short commercials sell more than long copy. You know they’re wrong. They indulge in entertainment. You know they’re wrong. You know to a dollar. They don’t. Why don’t you tell them? Why don’t you save them from their follies? For two reasons. First, because you’re impressed by the fact that they’re so big and so well paid and so well publicized. You’re even perhaps impressed by their reputation for creativity, whatever that may mean. Second, you never meet them. You’ve inhabited different worlds. The chasm between direct response advertising and general advertising is wide. On your side of the chasm I see knowledge and reality. On the other side of the chasm I see ignorance. You are the professionals. This must not go on. I predict that the practitioners of general advertising are going to start learning from your experience. They are going to start picking your brains.

Sadly and incorrectly, marketing is something many businesses compartmentalize into silos.

The Solution: Stop Treating Marketing like a Silo Operation

Marketing is still seen as its own organization that takes products, services, solutions, or messages to market using gut-level instincts. Traditionally, marketing has been viewed as a group of people with glamorous job titles like managing director, senior vice president, vice president, director, manager, and coordinator whose main functions are to lead the horse to the water in the hope that it will drink.

This, of course, is a conventional, twentieth-century way of viewing marketing roles. With software and data analytics, marketing can now be more of a creative workshop to build new products based on customer experience. While software may be disrupting how marketing functions, it is also flipping the table on how organizations assemble products and go-to-market strategies, even reorganizing teams where creative hybrids apply real-time, data-driven decision making.

As the global economy evolves and market forces drive competition for jobs, including marketing roles, people who have pro-actively worked to expand and diversify their skill sets will be the most well placed in the creative economy. When you synthesize your knowledge and skills into a new offering, you evolve from a knowledge economy worker into a creative economy entrepreneur. Thomas Friedman wrote about just this scenario in his book The World Is Flat: “Everyone is looking for employees who can do critical thinking and problem solving. . . . What they are really looking for are people who can invent, re-invent and re-engineer their jobs while doing them.”

Conventional marketers and advertisers may be satisfied that they are still generating revenue right now. The question isn’t a matter of if but when that all will come to a fizzled end. Vivek Wadwha, a fellow at Rock Center for Corporate Governance, at Stanford University; director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University; and distinguished fellow at the think-tank/university Singularity University in California, wrote a December 2014 Washington Post article about this. His message should make conventional marketers raise their eyes from the email they spend too much time sending and take notice that not only will the marketing industry be disrupted but every industry in which marketing has a role, from manufacturing to supply-chain management, from finance to energy, and from health care to education to communications, will also be disrupted.

According to Wadwha, not one industry is immune from the rapid change that is about to dismantle everything we’ve become accustomed to. Wadwha wrote:

In practically every industry that I look at, I see a major disruption happening. I know the world will be very different 15 to 20 years from now. The vast majority of companies who are presently the leaders in their industries will likely not even exist. That is because industry executives are either not aware of the changes that are coming, reluctant to invest the type of money required for them to reinvent themselves, or protecting legacy businesses. Most are focused on short-term performance. New trillion-dollar industries will come out of nowhere and wipe out existing trillion-dollar industries. This is the future we’re headed into, for better or for worse.

The type of disruption Wadwha was talking about isn’t new. First, we moved from an agricultural era to an industrial era, then to a knowledge era, and now to a new creative age. People who find opportunities in a changing environment are those who are actively looking for them. Marketers included.

Marketing now allows for new ways to initiate small-batch creative execution. Today you can analyze data on how people interact with the messaging or experience, monitor what they actually say about your company, test reactions to new features, and work in conjunction with your customers to build better products or a better world.

Marketing isn’t just for businesses, either. Nor is it something done only by the marketing department or by people with “marketing” in their title. Marketing can and should be used by nonprofits, governments, politicians, scientists, and anyone else who deals with spreading and adopting new ideas.

MARKETING AND THE NEW NORMAL

The creative imagination is important because right before our very eyes we are transitioning to what Peter Drucker called a “post- capitalist economy.” It scares many people who cannot see beyond the standard of living to which many of us have become accustomed.

Cognitive capitalism has begun to rapidly erode the industrial economy. Marketing still rooted in that industrial economy has no choice but to go in a different direction. Hence, talking about marketing ideas or products without discussing the overall shift in the economy would make this book irrelevant. Tactics and techniques don’t live on islands, unto themselves. They are part of the larger world around us.

Those who approach this book with both feet firmly rooted in the twentieth century will have a hard time understanding some of the tools and personality traits required to make the leap. Even if you work in an industrial-era company that includes manufacturing or producing tangible goods, you’ll find that all companies will become social by design in the next five years.

The best companies and organizations will act and think very much like open-source software. Success will be determined by constantly testing and experimenting with new designs. Design is at the center of all human experience.

Steve Jobs built Apple—which as of this writing is the world’s most valuable company—by focusing not on technology or marketing but on design. While I am a huge fan of engineering degrees and engineers (I did go to Lehigh University, a school heavily rooted in engineering), I believe that empathy, design, and emotional intelligence—three key skills for disruptive marketing and design—are better learned from an immersion in the arts, humanities, and psychology than from pure business, engineering, and management disciplines. An art history major who has studied paintings of the impressionists or “outsider art” may have gained insights into the human elements of technology and the importance of its usability. Psychologists and sociologists are more likely than pure marketers to know how to motivate people and understand what users want. A musician, chef, or fine artist who is driven to create always leads and innovates in a world in which we can develop almost anything we imagine.

The most disruptive marketers believe in using all possibilities available to them, including nondigital tools, in a world with ever more abundant goods and greater access to ever more information. This sometimes runs in contradiction to older systems rooted in hierarchy, monopoly, and scarcity. However, those who look for networks, platforms, and hive mind thinking to be the new avenues of feedback engagement and growth will find success.

In a world where authenticity and transparency reign supreme, marketing rooted in scarcity will have a short shelf life. Business schools have taught many to think that the 4Ps (product, price, promotion, place) are guarantees of success. In 2012, the 4Ps were updated to pivot toward people, processes, programs, and performance, but even this is becoming antiquated thinking in a world where process is redefined almost hourly based on customer behavior. The descriptions of the skills many say a marketer should possess are usually off the mark now in a matter of months, not years, because of advances in technology and customer behavior that adapt to those changes more rapidly than do businesses.

David Zweig, author of Invisibles: Celebrating the Unsung Heroes of the Workplace, declares that what brand marketers have been taught in terms of framing, identity, and promotion is now highly irrelevant:

So, aside from the time invested/wasted in promoting yourself online, and thinking about how to promote yourself, that could likely be better spent actually working on whatever it is you do, creating stuff, rather than marketing yourself as someone who creates stuff, there’s now the real risk of alienating the people you are trying to impress. . . .

Because it’s become so pervasive, there’s a growing sense that when someone is branding or promoting themselves too much or in too overt a way, that they are dishonest. Because after all, branding, if not inherently dishonest, certainly is about only promoting the positive. . . . Even if the brand you create is accurate, and not purposefully intended as a promotional lie, the problem still is the fact that you are spending too much time worrying about how you appear to others.

If you have this promotional mindset, you’ll want to relearn what you’ve been taught, based on Zweig’s points. Having marketing skills and an MBA is no longer enough to be successful. Being a promotional zealot will make you appear dishonest, even if what you are saying is the truth. None of what you’ve been taught about marketing will give you enough leverage in a world filled with abundant ideas, solutions, products, data, and services.

Disruptive marketers understand that technology dictates the pace of change in human behavior, and that technology’s evolution is accelerating at an exponential rate. This is known as Moore’s Law, which states that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years. In a 1965 paper, Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation and Fairchild Semiconductor, described a yearly doubling in the number of components per integrated circuit. In 1975, he altered the forecast, revising that time to every two years. Moore’s Law is used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development. The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore’s Law: quality-adjusted microprocessor prices, memory capacity, sensors, and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras. All of these are improving at roughly exponential rates as well.

DESIGNING DISRUPTION

Where did the concept of disruptive marketing originate and why do I use it? It’s rooted in the terms creative disruption and disruptive innovation. Creative disruption is doing things in the creative process differently from before. Disruptive innovation is an advance that helps create a new market that eventually (over a few years or decades) overthrows or topples an existing market, displacing an earlier technology.

There are many examples of disruptive innovation in the history of technology: the transistor radio (which displaced high-fidelity players), mini steel mills (which displaced vertically integrated steel mills), ultrasound (which displaced radiography), downloadable digital media (which displaced physical products like CDs and DVDs), and Wikipedia (which displaced printed encyclopedias). When we talk about disruptive marketing, we mean the act of designing brand strategy differently from how it was previously created.