Ageless Marketing

Say It Ain't So, Dove

I am stunned. I feel cheated. I am mad. Damn mad!

For several years I have been touting Dove’s Real Beauty campaign as a high-minded example of authenticity in consumer marketing. Imagine my dismay, then, when I discovered in the May 12 issue of The New Yorker that the real beauties in Dove’s Real Beauty campaign are not real.

The success of the Real Beauty campaign still validates my original points:

• Being honest in today’s markets can pay off big
• The zeitgeist has shifted from an emphasis on idealization to an emphasis on reality

No need existed for Dove to hire the world’s reputed best pixalist, Pascal Dangin, to digitally turn “ordinary” women into – well – ordinary women. There is no lack of doughy-fleshed women.

Remember Jamie Lee Curtis’s famous full-page pose in the September 2002 issue of More? She agreed to be that issue’s cover story subject if More would show her as she is in a sports halter and shorts shot – billowing love handles and all, with no makeup, no special photographer’s lighting and no air brushing or its contemporary equivalent, pixel manipulation.

Thankfully, More had the good sense to agree with Ms. Curtis. It was rewarded for its wisdom by the greatest positive reader reaction in the history of the magazine that translated into a huge bump in audited readership.

For the most part, the mind of the market today wants the unvarnished truth. It is beyond the contrived world of youth where appearances count for more than substance. Be honest or be gone, it says. Because Dove doesn’t understand this I now have to spend a good chunk of my valuable time changing a series of PowerPoint slides and altering a heretofore important slice of content in many of my presentations on today’s markets.

 

The Silent Generation Revisited

Reader Anita Landis of the GlynnDevins ad agency in Overland Park, Kansas sent me the URL to an article on the Silent Generation that ran in the June 29, 1970 issue of Time. I found the article by Time Associate Editor Gerald Clarke fascinating from several perspectives.

First, it was written by a member of the Silent Generation who had bought into the idea that it was every bit as different as the first article on the subject claimed. That was Time’s cover story on November 5, 1951.

Second, the 1970 article cited a number of ways in which the Silent Generation was different contained a number of that are also being used today to show how Generation Y or Millenials are different from previous generations.

For example, Clarke who was 32 (three years year older than I was then) at the time wrote:

• We were incapable of hero worship. Those we most admired, in fact, were not real heroes but the anti-heroes of fiction or film: the Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises or the Humphrey Bogart of Casablanca.
• For us, coolness was all. Like Holden Caulfield, the confused but knowing teen-age protagonist of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye —the novel that became the decade's literary touchstone — we detested anything that we felt was phony.
• Only today, in our 30s, do we know that we were different—fundamentally different. When the generation lines began to form, we discovered, to our own surprise, that we did not automatically side with our parents.
• We may be the only ones left in American society who can see what's great and what's bull," says Frank Conroy, 34, the author of Stop-Time.

Cannot those descriptions be applied to Gen Y’ers?

Yes, the so-called Silent Generation was different. But is was also the same. When doing a comparative analysis of generational differences, it is wise to separate true differences from apparent differences which aren’t differences after all.

Aside from citing apparent differences as real differences, Clarke did do a worthy job of capturing the behavioral essence of the last generation to come of age before television became a ubiquitous fact of life in America. I know. I was there as a fellow Silent Generation type trying to resolve the great moral gap between my parent’s generation and the incoming boomer generation.

Interesting read, Clarke’s piece, when you get a moment.

 

 

 

 

On Sloppy Scholarship and the Silent Generation

Sloppy scholarship sometimes makes me mad. I especially get upset when it shows up in a widely esteemed newspaper like the New York Times. Why? Because many people in important positions will take on faith claims made in the great gray lady of U.S. journalism irrespective of their accuracy or lack thereof.

Last Sunday’s editorial section carried such piece. It was titled, “When the Time Make the Man."

In it, editorial page editor Sam Tanenhaus poses the possibility that “Americans born in the 1930s lack the particular qualities we look for in our national leaders.”

I guess that pretty much takes care of presidential candidate John McCain's hopes. He was born in 1936.

McCain is a member of the Silent Generation – so called because it has failed to distinguish itself in the political life of America.

Full disclosure: I was born in 1933.

The problem with the Silents, says Tanenhaus, is that they were collectively disengaged from politics and distrustful of ideology. Just look at Edward Kennedy and Michael Dukakis Tanenhaus offers up as Exhibit A in making his claim about the congenitally weak leadership that marks those born in the 1930s.

If the reputation of the boomer generation has been hyperinflated, then the reputation of the Silent Generation has been as flat as yesterday’s beer. Tanenhaus completely disregards such nationally prominent – indeed, globally prominent in many cases – leaders as Martin Luther King (a fellow Silent, though born in 1929), Ralph Nader (1934), Tom Hayden (1939), Jerry Rubin (1938), Jane Fonda (1937), Abby Hoffman (1936), and Gloria Steinem (1934). In fact, nearly all the national leaders in the feminist movement of the 1960s and ‘70s were born in the 1930s.

You might not have liked the politics of those figures were you around and involved in the 1960s and ‘70s, but you can’t deny their status as national leaders. Collectively, they reshaped the politics and morals of the nation.

From the other end of the spectrum come such national leaders as James Baker (1930), Colin Powell (1937), and Donald Rumsfeld (1932).

A Wikipedia entry on has this to say about the Silent Generation:

In the book Boom Bust and Echo, Canadian author David Foot takes a different perspective on this group arguing that those born in the 1930s and early 1940s are the most successful generation. He argues that because so few people were born during the depression and the war that employment opportunities were abundant and this group quickly rose to the top and became the management and superiors of the great mass of baby boomers that came after them. Using economic indicators he finds that 1938 was the best year to be born in North America, in terms of economic success. The impact of the generation was also great culturally, as the musicians and thinkers such as Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Bob Dylan who shaped the fashions of the boomers and were often associated with the pop culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

In sum, Sam Tanenhaus’s take on the Silent Generation is unpardonable balderdash. But unfortunately, it reflects the sort of sloppy scholarship seen in the gross generalizations we suffer about boomers, and subsequent generations. Interestingly, no broadly accepted definition of how many years add up to a generation exists. Some references to Generation X mark its bookends as 1965 to 1976 – just 11 years.

Lack of consistency in how many years mark a generation doesn’t seem to bother those who insist on comparing generations in terms of buying power, worldviews and behavior.

The key take-away point of this post is beware of generational generalities. They have about as much utility in analyzing, planning and making marketing decisions as a fork has for eating soup.

For another critique of Sam Tanenhaus’s article see the Boston Globe’s Brainiac entry.

 

 

The Most Mythologized Generation in History

Surely the boomer generation, if not the greatest generation, is the most mythologized generation in history.

Interestingly the boomer generation was not named until former People magazine editor Landon Jones did so in his 1981book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation. By then, the oldest boomer was 35-years-old – well past his or her hell-raising years of youthhood.

The term “boomer” has been a buzzword bigtime in marketing circles since the first boomers turned 60 in January of 2006. It seems that almost everyone in business is trying to figure out how to make oodles of money in boomer markets as its constituents head into their sunset years.

I am frequently asked, “What products do you think will do well in aging boomer markets.” My stock answer is, “same products that did well when their parents were in their twilight years.”

From podiums, in newsletters, in conference rooms and in books and media quotes, many self-avowed boomer experts spew out spurious claims that readers and audiences internalize as gospel fact. It starts with the claim that boomers have changed everything in their path from their childhood on.

For the record, boomers were not – despite oft-heard claims to the contrary – the driving force in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s. It was the so-called “Silent Generation” whose members included Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Nader, Bobby Kennedy, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez – and on and on and on. You will not find the name of a single boomer on any list of thought leaders in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Despite their overblown record as supreme world changers (keep in mind that every generation since the dawn of the industrial revolution has been a world-changing generation), boomers are still being described in unsupportable terms.

Take for example the claim that boomers are entering old age much healthier than their parents and destined to live much longer. In light of recent research, both claims turn out to be overstated.

Last Fall, Beth Soldo of the University of Pennsylvania released a study indicating that boomers are not as healthy as their parents were at comparable ages.

From all over came cries of denial and outrage by protagonists of boomer superiority. The data were incorrectly analyzed. The research protocols were flawed. The interpretations of findings failed to take into account the fact that boomers reporting poorer health than their parents simply have higher expectations about their health than parents. Those and other statements of protest sought to undermine Dr. Soldo’s research.

Now comes another study that supports Dr. Soldo’s research. According to a study covering 1,000 counties, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of women for the first time since the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic. Life expectancy of men also fell, although by not so nearly large margins.

While the study was limited to a sampling of counties, a number of which are in poorer region of the country, the findings nevertheless indicate that claims of boomer superhealth are wildly overstated.

The fact that life expectancy is falling in a significant slice of the population should not be surprising given that 65 percent of Americans are overweight with nearly 35 percent being chronically obese. Those who talk about the trillion dollar-plus healthier and lnger living boomer population seem to be drawing on generalizations based on regulars at Gold’s Gym and the aging cyclists and runners on the trails and roadways in their communities.

So, the concluding point keep your grains of salt at hand when someone is about to tell you about boomers. Being the most mythologized generation in history, much of what you hear about boomers is sheer confabulation.

 

 

 

 

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10 Ideas That Are Changing the World We Live, Work and Play In (Part 3a)

World-changing idea #3: The Ebbing Value of Expertise (Part 2a)

Objectivity is supposedly the superior cognitive stance to take in searching for truth. But is that always the case? How often do we hear experts battling it out in courtrooms over two contradictory propositions based on alleged objective analysis?

The ubiquity of communications in our lives – including news and talk shows 24/7 – contributes to shaping an uncertain picture of what’s true and what’s not true in the mind of the market. The collective mind lacks the certainty it once had. People are depending less on the mills of reason, which produce certainty, than on the chemistry of their feelings – which produce only probabilities – in shaping shape their views. Stated another way, people are being less objective and more subjective in shaping their thoughts and decisions.

The aging of society is one of the biggest reasons for today’s more subjectively based zeitgeist. People’s confidence in their feelings tends to increase in the second half of life. More and more, “objective” facts appear to be someone’s opinion. This especially seems true to those who recall how often they’ve seen a study revealing some new truth that is later overturned by another study.

After four or five decades of life, human fallibility becomes all the more self-evident to many of us. The good news is that this inclines many of us to be forgiving of human error. However, it also makes us more guarded – less trusting of claims by others irrespective of any objective research behind the claims.

When we’re young, we often insist on objective proof that some claim is valid. This is why atheism generally arises earlier in life. By mid-adulthood, most of us become more comfortable with intuited conclusions whether or not they can be supported by objective reasoning.

Throughout the last half of the 20^th century, marketing was finely tuned to the objectively biased younger mind. Product ads cited allegedly scientific reasons why the advertised product was better than its competitors. Such advertising is out of tune with the subjectively biased zeitgeist of today. Marketing must court the emotional, intuitive, feeling side of the brain – the right brain.

The right brain is the pattern-seeking side of the brain. It looks for connections and relationships. Unlike the 20^th century market who pitched to the logical, reasoning, objective left side of the brain, 21^st century marketers will find greater success courting the right brain.

The right brain is the portal to the left brain: if something doesn’t feel right to the right brain, it’s not likely to earn landing rights in the left brain – especially among today’s adult majority.

The Internet has increased the confidence of people in their subjectively-derived view of the world. Everyone can be an expert in what ever field he or she chooses to be an expert. Whether that is true or not is unimportant. The fact that people believe they can become expert in a matter through the Internet is what is important.

Most of us probably have at least one story we can tell about how someone we know learned something on the Internet that they had been unable to find out about elsewhere. In some cases, that Internet acquired information has saved a life.

We have a story in our family about how the Internet was the ultimate source of a new life. For nearly 20 years one of my daughters had a condition that no doctor she went to could name. Two of its symptoms were morbid obesity and infertility. About 10 years ago, my daughter learned the name of her malady on the Internet and how she could get relief from its symptoms. In just 11 months she shed 110 pounds, and with her return to normal weight she became fertile. Within a year she had her first natural born child – a daughter named Elizabeth. She had already adopted three children.

Due to that and several other experiences – one that was life threatening to one of her adopted daughters – my daughter is not easily impressed with someone's alleged expertise. She, like many people in today’s marketplace, want to explore the relationship potential before getting around to the left brain chore of assessing the matter of expertise.

So, the challenge to marketers in this day when the value customers accord alleged expertise is waning is to learn better how to develop the relationship between providers and customers. That’s not easy to for practitioners in a field noted for crowing about being the best, the greatest value, the most dependable in its line, the most beautiful of all, etc. Today’s zeitgeist calls for building human relationships with customers – not commercial or transactional relationships.

 

 

10 Ideas That Are Changing the World We Live, Work and Play In (Part 3)

World-changing idea #3: The Ebbing Value of Expertise

“I’m being objective!” Surely, you’ve had someone you’ve been arguing with scream that at you. Perhaps you have even yelled those words yourself on occasion.

I remember – always with a smile on my face a self-styled “left brain” account shouting at me in disagreement on a point, “God damn it! I’m being objective. You are being emotional,” as he pounded a clenched fist on the conference room table.

Objectivity ain’t what it used to be. In fact, its popularity is dwindling. Farhad Manjoo titles the penultimate chapter in his True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society “The Twilight of Objectivity.”

Tradition holds that truth is accessible only through objective inquiry and accurately transmittable only through dispassionately executed argument. However, a proposition that is broadly held to reflect objective reality, even if held so for centuries, ultimately has no defensible eternal claim of veracity. It is but a consensus about a purported slice of reality.

A steady decline of confidence in objective thought is lowering the value  people place in the idea of expertise because we tend to associate expertise not only with experience, but with the ability to think objectively about matters, leaving emotions or subjective perceptions on the sidelines. We want this ability in our judges, personal lawyers, doctors, financial analysts and other we've elected or hired to protect and serve our interests.

Social philosopher Pierre Levy observed in Collective Intelligence (1994):

“Only by incorporating cultural and moral objectives, aesthetic experience, can business engage the subjectivity of its employees, as well its customers…

… Because it conditions all other activities, the continuous production of subjectivity will most likely be considered the major economic activity throughout (this) century.”

Levy is talking about what Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore call the Experience Economy in their book by that name. He is talking about Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind . Pink, like True Enough’s Manjoo, is a celebrant in the last rites for objectivity – or more properly perhaps, Cartesian objectivity.

For several centuries, science has unfolded in accordance with Rene Descartes’ tenet that nothing can be deemed true until proven to be so through objective analysis that yields predictable hence replicable results. Over time, virtually every field of mainstream human thought became subordinate to the idea that truth was verifiable only through objectively guided investigation. However, the same level of certainty that physicists work with cannot be achieved in a wide spectrum of other human endeavors, such as human behavior.

James Shanteau is an expert on experts. He has spent his entire professional life studying experts. He has found that in fields characterized by absolutely predictable events such as physics, chemistry and engineering, experts far outperform nonexperts. However, in fields that resist absolutely predictable events, such as stock picking, horse picking and human behavior, nonexperts often outperform the experts.

James Surowiecki popularized the term “the wisdom of crowds” in his book by that name. The subtitle of the book is Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, societies and Nations. Chalk one up for “common sense.”

Throughout all my growing up years, through the early and middle years of my life intuition was denigrated as having no value in truth-seeking. In my childhood, comic strips, movies and radio comedy shows like Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly talked about intuition as a woman’s way of figuring things out.

However of late, intuition has been gaining respectability in spite of its being a nonobjective approach to discovering truth. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink quickly became a best seller in 2005 because the zeitgeist was already experiencing erosion of a several centuries-old objective foundation. Tolerance for subjectively rooted expressions about what is truth and what is not was on a rapid rise. Other books, such as Gary Klein’s Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions – which preceded Blink, and actually a more informative book – have helped give intuition legitimacy in respectable thinking society.

Then comes Wikipedia – a living organic testimony to the veracity that is abundantly present in “the wisdom of the crowds” that often strays wide of objective thinking. Having been the subject of an abundance of criticism for the certain veins of error streaking through its corpus, Wikipedia was subjected to an exhaustive investigation sponsored by the British magazine Nature in 2007. The analysis consisted of in depth comparisons with the Encyclopedia Britannica on the same topics. To the astonishment of many, Wikipedia and Britannica scored about the same for accuracy.

Next: How the Ebbing Value of Expertise Is Changing the Rules of Marketing

 

10 Ideas That Are Changing the World We Live, Work and Play In (Part 2a)

Ego Transcendence: Perhaps the biggest world-changing idea on the planet today, Part 2

Imagine what advertising would look liked if 65 percent of consumers were teenagers. (Of course, sometimes advertising does look like most marketers believe that most consumers are teens.)

What would prevailing fashions look like? How would retail centers look – and sound?

The answers to those questions don’t require a Ph.D. in consumer psychology to arrive at answers. Advertising would be raucous, rude and often vulgar – or hopelessly idealistic, heroic and romantic (with sex oozing from every pixel).

Fashions would be in-your-face, contra adult, ostentatious and audacious. Primary colors would dominate and pastels eschewed. Retail venues would be boisterously alive with sounds, colors, lights and smells. Mannequins would be strewn around sporting eerily weird (by adult standards) visages.

The customary excesses of youth would be metaphorically captured in every heartbeat of commerce. Narcissism – a term inspired by the mythical self-centered Grecian youth who a god turned into a flower – would be celebrated in every commercially framed visual and auditory statement directed to the adolescent majority. Impetuosity would be reflected, embraced and celebrated everywhere.

There would be no ambiguity, no nuance because, as brain scans have now shown, teens live in a world defined by the verb to be. Something either is or is not. There are no shades of gray, no maybe’s, no it depends. The teen brain is remarkable impervious to nuance.

Now imagine what advertising would look liked if 65 percent of adult consumers were 40 and older. Well, actually, you don’t have to image that. Sixty-five percent of adult consumers are age 40 and older.

Same follow on questions: What would prevailing fashions look like? How would retail centers look – and sound?

The answers are a bit more complex. Maybe it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in consumer psychology to come up with the right answers, but it helps a whole lot to know something about how worldviews, attitudes, values, behavior and even cognitive operations progressively undergo dramatic changes beginning around the onset of midlife.

These changes reflect something of a personal paradigm shift  that can begin influencing behavior as early as the mid-thirties and later throughout the forties. However, it appears that people generally begin to become aware of changes in behavior around the early forties.

So, whenever a person first becomes aware of new influences on his or her outlook on life – like deepened awareness of one’s mortality – narcissistic self-centeredness and materialistic influences on outlook and behavior ebb.

In midlife, the normal path of development leads to self-centeredness progressively giving way to others-centeredness. Aspirations link less and less to materialistic values. Lifestyles increasingly reflect desires for simplicity. Youthful tolerance for artifice dissolves in favor of authenticity.

While earlier the worldviews, values and behavior of others – especially peers – was a frequently tapped source of behavioral cues and clues, we grow more comfortable by the year with another source for guidance in our worldviews, values and behavior: ourselves.

During the process of all these changes, we begin to make progress in tending to one Carl Jung’s Seven Tasks of Aging: Letting go of the ego. According to Jung, gaining comfort with aging and dying depends on letting go of the ego – or ego transcendence.

People’s desires to give back, to leave a legacy, to enrich others with no expectation of return reflect the ego in recession.

As much as the zeitgeist would reflect consummate ego projection were society dominated by teens, now that adults 40 and older comprise the adult majority, the zeitgeist increasingly projects the effects of ego transcendence.

The rising influence of the so-called triple bottom line – People, Planet and Profit – draws much of its force from the zeitgeist of an aging society. Notably, philanthropy is growing at an unprecedented pace – double digit annual growth since the early 1990s, when people 40 and older became the adult majority for the first time.

Importantly, consumer trend watchers like Yankelovich, Roper ASW and Harris Interactive all report stronger philanthropic proclivities among Gen Y’ers or Millenials that seen among members of previous generations at the same age. This, along with numerous other traits attributed to younger people, demonstrate the influence of ego transcendence on consumers worldviews, values, aspirations and lifestyles among people of all ages. The implications for marketers are enormous, yet few have homed in on this idea even though it might be the most influential idea of all that is changing the world.

Next in this series: World-changing idea #3: The Ebbing Value of Expertise

10 Ideas That Are Changing the World We Live, Work and Play In (Part 2)

Ego Transcendence: Perhaps the biggest world-changing idea on the planet today.

For more than 3,000 years, values rooted in the masculine soul dominated the civilized world. Polio vaccine discoverer Jonas Salk, who called those values ego values, took note of this in a paper he wrote shortly before his death in 1995.

Ego values, which fuel the competitive spirit in men, have been a driving force behind humankind’s cultural and technological progress over the millennia. However, said Salk, the future of humankind now depends more on cooperation than on competition. The time has come in the name of human survival, he said, for a cultural shift toward being values.

                                   

Ego Values   Dominant for 3,000 years; masculine	Being   Values   Beyond materialism; quality over   quantity; feminine or androgynous
Intellect	Intuition
Reason	Feeling
Objective	Subjective
Morality	Reality
Differences	Differentiation
Competition	Cooperation
Power	Influence
Win-Lose	Win-Win

In essence, Salk was calling for a massive surge of ego transcendence. On an individual basis, ego transcendence is the mark of those existing in an advanced state of psychological maturity. In fact, one of the items on Carl Jung’s Seven Tasks of Aging whose accomplishment leads to a regret-free, peaceful and joyous old age was “letting go of the ego.”

Because people in the second half of life are now the adult majority among the developed world’s one billion people, Salk’s hoped for surge of ego transcendence is underway. Notwithstanding armed conflicts around the world that flow from the muscular expression of ego values, there is very clearly a global movement that is weakening the influence of materialistic self-centeredness that defined advanced cultures of the 20^th century.

Paul Hawkins writes about the global cultural shift toward others-centeredness in his recent book Blessed Unrest. In the business world the idea of ego transcendence is being embraced on an ever broadening front under the notion of the Three P’s – Profit, People and Planet.

It’s curious that Time magazine, in drawing up its list of “10 ideas that are changing the world” missed altogether what is perhaps the strongest idea of all – looking for and finding personal life satisfaction by rising above the ego and joining with fellow beings to promote higher life quality for everyone on the planet.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate (2006) Mohammad Yunus, 69, is a towering example of that others-centered aspiration. For a truly inspiring insight into the mind and heart of this Bangladeshian economics professor, please visit a video presentation of the Charlie Rose segment in which Mr. Rose interviewed Dr. Yunus.

Dr. Yunus believes that fully half of the world’s population of abjectly poor people (less than $1 a day in income) can be eliminated by 2015 – just seven years away, anf that not too long after that abject poverty – like small pox – can be totally eradicated from the earth.

The ranks of those who agree with Dr. Yunus is growing. Twenty years ago he would have been seen as a crank. But now, the success of his microlending program which already has lifted millions of families above abject poverty, has turned him from eccentric crank into a sage of uncommon wisdom.

And Dr.Yunus’s efforts are just one example of how a planet-wide surge of ego transcendence is transforming the human experience, and indeed, possibly us all from apocalyptic disasters.

Next: A sampling of the marketing implications of ego transcendence in the consumer population..

 

 

 

 

 

The Elder Storytelling Place: A Gold Mine of Insights into the Older Mind

A friend and former creative director at Young and Rubicam, now working independently and specializing in second half markets, called me the other day to get my thoughts on a campaign he's working on for a nonprofit org that has a large second half constituency in the older age ranges.

During the course of our conversation it came to me that there is a really good source of insights into the worldviews, values and behavior of people in their 60s and beyond that I have nevet thought to mention in this space. Shame on me.

Ronni Bennett, a former television producer who worked on Barbara Walters specials among other shows has blog As Time Goes On.   It deals with a wide range of topics associated with aging and aging issues. However, speaking as a marketer its greatest value to me is affiliated blog called The Elder Storytelling Place.

Ronni set up The Elder Storytelling Place to give readers of the mother blog a place to tell stories about themselves. I find richer insights in these stories than any gathered through traditional market research. Certainly, far more illuminating insights than can be gathered through surveys, but also more teling than focus groups.

For example, read Holly's story. Or Sue's story. And Colleen's story.

While creative directors pore over research results and reduce their gleanings to one-page briefs that will guide creatives, the stories told by people who want to to share their perspectives on life provide more certain guidance.

As a marketer, surely the most important tool you can have in hand is a profound awareness if not full understanding of the customer's mind. Taken together, over time, you will get that awareness in terms of older cusotmers' minds from Ronni Bennett's The Elder Storytelling Place.

When you visit The Elder Storytelling Place be sure to look ijn the lower right hand column for a listing of additional storytelling sites.

Next posting - The second world-changing idea: The Co-creation Phenomenon

BBDO's New Campaign for New Balance: Catastrophic

My friends and fellow bloggers Tom Asacker and Michele Miller just ruined my day yesterday. Within an hour or so, each sent me news of a potentially catastrophic personally change in sneaker maker New Balance’s brand.

Imagine walking down the street one day when you suddenly see an old friend named Alex coming toward you. Your heart pounds, a smile covers your face and you quicken your pace to get to Alex as quickly as you can. But something is wrong. He neither quickened his pace to get to you nor sported a smile. There was no sign of friendliness in his face. In fact, Alex showed no sign at all of recognizing you. For a moment you think you have just seen an Alex look-alike. But no, it’s him. He has that unusual crescent-shaped birthmark just below his left ear. What could ever have so changed his personality? A stroke maybe?

You would be shocked to the bottom of your feet to see such a personality change in an old friend.

New Balance is an old friend to many people. It has been a caring (more shoe widths than any other major sneaker maker) and modest (it focuses more on performance than on style) brand. Shoe retailers love NB because it can restock or deliver newly designed stock to their shelves within days. Nike, Adidas and the like require six months or more lead time, meaning retailers have to order in larger lots and guess what customers will want far ahead in the future.

Many shoe customers love NB because it strives to make as many shoes in the U.S. as possible – by last reckoning, about 30 percent of its production. Employees love NB because of management’s generosity and concern for worker welfare. NB has been a much loved brand. I have long been one of its lovers.

Boomers have been the biggest part of NB’s core market for nearly 20 years. As boomers began moving into midlife, NB was there beside them, continuously engineering adjustments in shoe design to accommodate foot and legwork systems that were beginning to show the wear and tear of age.

Now, NB is abandoning the friendships that took it from the 12^th ranked position among sneaker makers in 1990 to number three ranking today. It left its old friends suddenly and without any warning. This breach of good faith began when NB majority owner Jim Davis, who bought NB in the 1970s for about $100,000 and turned it into a major international brand, decided to ease up a bit and bring on a new CEO. Last year, former consumer products (such as Gillette razor blades and Pringle's potato chips) executive Robert T. DeMartini took over as NB’s CEO. DeMartini wants to go young at a time when there is no growth of any significance in young as far ahead as the eye can see.

Jim Davis would do well to study what has been going on at Starbucks and challenge his CEO’s thinking. Starbucks Chairman recently returned to the CEO position to try and get the company back on tract after its progressive departure over the past several years from its original brand essence.

Starbucks' waywardness from its brand essence occurred over a longer period of time and more subtly than has occurred with the NB brand. The latter’s break from its past has been instantaneous, boisterous as well as just plain silly. Check this commercial out to see what I mean. Look in the right hand column to see additional examples of a campaign that is all the more astonishing (in a negative way) because it is the product of the renowned BBDO agency. Have they been filling the ranks of their creatives with high school students in a money-saving gesture?

Perhaps not since the ill-fated “It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign has there been a more egregious high profile disregard for the laws of branding.

Jim and Ann, please take back control of your lifework’s future while it still has one. Your cherished NB has long been one of the companies I hold up as a marketing and management exemplar in my books, articles, blog postings, speeches and workshops. Please, let us have the old NB back.

A Neueroanatomist's Strange Journey through Her Own Brain

As my regular readers know, I am perpetually fascinated by the brain. Speaking as a marketer, I don't know how anyone in the business of trying to influence others to buy a product or service could not be fascinated by the instrument they must convince of the worthiness of a purchase.

Yesterday, a friend sent me the URL to a startling engaging video that poignantly demonstrates that we have not one mind but two. The video was of a talk delivered at this year's TED conference. TED is an attendance-by-invitation only assembly of leading thinkers and doers from around the globe in technology, entertainment and design.
At this year''s conference neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor captivated her audience with a riveting  description of a stroke she suffered as it unfolded. During the traumatic episode the hemispheres of her brain lost contact with each other, allowing her right hemisphere to transport her to a spectacular mind space of cosmic dimensions.

When you have 18 minutes to watch and hear Dr. Taylor's talk, take it in. You will likely never forget the experience which at TED brought everyone instantly to their feet when she finished. Click here to participate in an extraordinary journey through the human mind-brain complex.

10 Ideas That Are Changing the World We Live, Work and Play In (Part 1)

The Socialization of Business: The Biggest Change in Capitalism Since Adam Smith

In my last post I promised you a list of 10 ideas that I believe are doing more to change the world than the 10 ideas Time listed in its March 24 edition. You may recall my intention to draw my list from the same categories Time used. However, once I went to work on my own list I discovered that sticking with Time’s categories would be to ignore some of the most influential ideas of our times.

Take business, for example. Time ignored that category despite the role of business in society undergoing the deepest conceptual change since Adam Smith laid down the foundations of capitalism in Wealth of Nations in 1776.

Like a person who has evolved from the self-centeredness of youthhood toward the others-centeredness of self-actualization, capitalistic enterprises are projecting more advanced states of socialization than ever before seen on a broad front. Legions of companies have taken up purposes of social significance far beyond service to their bottom lines. Many have adopted a multiple stakeholder relationship (MSR) business model.

Management in MSR companies intentionally address needs of other stakeholders from customers and employees to suppliers and society. Economist Muhammad Yunus, who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in eradicating poverty, calls this “conscious capitalism.”

Ever since British Parliament passed the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1844 corporations have been relieved of any social purpose. As Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman famously said, “(T)here is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”

Friedman regarded executives who operated their companies with a sense of social purpose as being un-American:

The businessmen (who) believe … that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends, has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing em­ployment, eliminating discrimination, avoid­ing pollution are preach­ing pure and unadulterated socialism. (They are) are unwitting pup­pets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.

Ever since Friedman wrote those words for a 1970 New York Magazine article, academicians, business leaders, social commentators and others have waged vigorous debates about the role of business enterprises in society. But as songster Bob Dylan sings, “The times they are a-changin’.” Those who believe that business’s only social responsibility is lawfully making profits are an endangered species.

As the size and power of companies have grown, so also has the “social conscience” of business. Some would counter that claim by calling attention to the recent Enrons, Tycos and WorldComs scandals. However, while commanding fewer and smaller headlines, companies in growing numbers have unabashedly incorporated a resolve to help create a better world into their missions.

Many are the companies that are taking on tasks traditionally considered the job of government and NGOs. For example Starbucks uses its considerable purchasing power to improve the life quality of people in coffee growing countries. It offers growers multi-year fixed prices regardless of fluctuations in market price. In exchange, growers must plow some of their profits back into educational, housing, healthcare and other social needs of their communities.

For the first time in history, companies economically rival most nations on earth. Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 43 are business enterprises. Their annual revenues are greater than the GDP of all but 57 nations. Within the next decade they will become the majority.

Foes of globalization see the growing power of companies as a dire threat that warrants government intervention. However, not many nations are likely to take actions that curb the growing power of business. They cannot afford to.

After a century of socialistic behavior, developed nations are finding it increasingly difficult to pay the bills. They are experiencing the double whammy of population shrinkage, which leads to falling tax revenues, and unprecedented growth in elderly populations, which increases the per capita costs of entitlements.

In the past, governments depended on taxes to cover costs associated with fulfilling their social agendas. Often, raising taxes is no longer politically or economically defensible. So, governments must look elsewhere for resources to meet public needs. One rapidly growing trend is selling public infrastructures from roads and bridges to ports and prisons to private enterprises on a revenue-sharing basis.

Many companies have moved on their own to address major social problems. GE’s much hailed ecoimagination initiative is one prominent example. Like a growing number other companies, GE sees profitable opportunities in taking actions that benefit the environment. Other social issues commanding the attention of globally operating companies include exploitation of workers in poorer nations.

One of the most impressive examples of business moving into traditional government territory to solve a major social problem is seen in the operation of the Grameen Bank.

Bangladeshian economist Muhammad Yunus invented the microlending industry to help the poor escape poverty. With a loan of as little as $25 to buy materials for handicrafts that she can sell in the open market, a depressingly poor woman can take herself and her family out of abject poverty.

Philanthropic activity is growing at an unprecedented rate. Some of it flows from corporately sponsored foundations. Other philanthropy is supported by individuals who have amassed great fortunes from business operations. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a notable example of the latter. The Gates Foundation is dedicated to ridding the world of malaria. It has also tackled illiteracy in poor nations around the world. The Gates Foundation has partnered with a number of public school systems in the U.S.to improve student performance by applying principles of sound business management to the administration of public education.

In the 20^th century, the welfare of societies and their members was largely left to government. In the 21^st century, business enterprise is playing an ever larger role in addressing the social agenda of nations around the world. Surely, the socialization of business is one of the most powerful ideas now shaping the world. Yet the March 24 edition of Time gave it no attention in its cover story, “10 Ideas that are changing the world.”

 

 

10 Ideas That Are Really Changing the World

Do you ever wonder how people come up with numbered lists like the Ten Sexiest Sons of silicon Valley or
Five Ways to Get Even with Your _ _ _ hole Boss. This week’s Time cover story is about 10 ideas that are changing the world. I wonder how Time''s editors came up with that list. To save you the newsstand price of $4.95, here are the 10 ideas that Time avers are changing the world:

#1 Common Wealth: how we must work together globally to avoid the dinosaurs’ fate.

#2 The End of Customer Service: Sales clerks are being replaced by technology.

#3 The Post-Movie Star Era: Movie success will depend on stories not famous faces.

#4 Reverse Radicalism: Talking to retired terrorists will show us how to end terrorism.

#5 Kitchen Chemistry: Home cooking will morph from art to science.

#6 Geoengineering: Zillions of mirrors in space could end global warming.

#7 Synthetic Authenticity: People like fake if it feels, looks, smells, sounds and tastes real.

#8 The New Austerity: People are going to start living within their means.

#9 Mandatory Health: Companies are going to make employees live healthy lives.

#10 Re-Judaizing Jesus: Jesus was a Jew after all. Get used to it!

 
There. I’ve not only saved you $4.95 and possibly some sales tax, but the 20 – 30 minutes you would have Except for #1 (which is not revelatory) and #6 (which could just be science fiction) Time’s list of world-changing ideas are about as intellectually worthy as contemplating the downward flow of a bubble of dew.

Time’s writers embellish the 10 articles with audacious hyperbole as though terms of exaggeration can impart gravitas that is otherwise missing. For example, in pontificating about #7, Time writer John Cloud describes my good friend Joe Pine (The Experience Economy and more recently Authenticity) and his partner Jim Gilmore as “legendary business consultants.”  I should think that Joe, who seems always to be rolling a toothpick around in his mouth, would feel a little embarrassed by that characterization, especially because it appears in an article that cites his book Authenticity. I know Joe. He’s much more real than legendary.

Of what importance is it that home cooks are going to start thinking of preparing supper as a scientific act? In the first place, I am hard pressed to believe that prediction.

Time’s audacious claim to be offering to readers “10 ideas that are changing the world” stands as a profoundly shallow reading of the world of today. Less than useless, the articles are not even mildly engaging.

So, even as I have yet to finish my series of occasional posts to “Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times,” I am going to start a new series: “10 Ideas That Are Changing the World.”   I will use many of the 10 categories in Time’s cover piece to show that Time’s writers missed the really big ideas in those categories that are changing the world -- and having direct relevance to us all.
 

Howard Shultz's Strategy for Dealing with the McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts Threat

There must be nearly as many definitions of what a brand is as there are people who offer one, but one world comes through probably more often than any other: promise.

However, if one starts with the premise that a brand is a personality – and there is good reason to believe so, based on recent brain research indicating how the mind/brain complex processes a brand – then calling a brand a promise is like defining you by the word smart. Smart you may be, but that hardly defines you as a personality.

I favor the definition offered recently by a client that I cited in this space last week: “Our brand is everything we do.” Is that not a robust way of describing a personality? Are you not the sum total of all you do? All you dream, perceive, think and do?

Howard Shultz views his Starbucks that way. The Starbuck’s brand is not coffee. It’s not even the taste of coffee, or the taste plus smell of coffee. Starbuck’s is the sum total of the customer’s experience. Shultz shaped one of the most amazing stories in marketing history based on that idea – that definition of a brand.

The Starbucks brand definition includes one of the most generous employee benefits plans around. It was the first company to offer liberal healthcare benefits to employees working less than half time.

The Starbucks brand definition includes its intentional efforts to save small family farms and improve the quality of life of people in agricultural villages around the world. It enters into multi-year fixed price contracts with coffee bean growers, thus relieving them of gut-wrenching angst over volatile commodity markets. In exchange for price stability, growers contractually commit to devoting as much as 10% of their revenues to help meet such local community needs as schools, healthcare and housing.

The Starbucks brand definition includes its humanistic devotion to needs of people in every core stakeholder group. It informs employees of a higher purpose to thier efforts, thereby engendering an infectious niceness that makes a customer's day perhaps a little brighter.

And, not least of all, Starbucks brand definition does include the sensuous qualia of the product, to be sure, but also the ambiance of the stores in which people buy and imbibe the product. Nothing in what you see in a Starbucks is just incidental. Everything within the compass of the human eye and ear is deliberately where it is in the manner that it is.

Skilled observers study customers' behavior in the store from the time they enter until their last step out the door. They study body language responses to the environment and seek ways to accommodate customers' natural ambulatory and sensual rhythms rather than trying to conform customer behavior to some designer's concept of how customers should behave.

Shultz’s famous leaked email was about his deep concern that Starbucks management had lost connection with the brand’s personality. In the interest of revenue growth, additions were made to the list of products to be sold that bore no relationship to the brand’s essence. For example, breakfast foods were introduced that diminished the warm, comforting aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Now, as of April 1, breakfast eats will be eliminated from Starbucks shelves.

Shultz wisely knows that a brand’s essence cannot be copied. There is not enough money in the entire world sufficient for turning a Pepsi into a Coca-Cola. Now that Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s are nipping at the weakened Starbucks heals, Shultz wants to take Starbucks back to its spiritual roots as an extraordinarily sensuous coffee-based delight in a setting where people come to meet for social and business reasons – the third place, in Shultz’s words. Neither Dunkin' Donuts nor McDonald's can copy Starbucks' expression of this idea.

I believe that despite some probable short-term disruptions in revenue patterns that Wall Street won’t like, Shultz’s strategy for dealing with McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts as well as thousands of long tail competitors across the land is a correct strategy that will in the long run pay off for everyone – investors included.

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Reading Recommendations Ahead of the Weekend

Take a look at this thought-provoking post, The Inversion of Advertising, as you start preparing for your weekend. If it doesn’t speak to you might think about hitching a one-way ride with Dr. Emmett L. Brown on one of his back-to-the-future time travels.

Also, somewhat along the same lines, but in a much expanded and quite smart treatment is a recent Aspen Institute report on Web 2.0, The Rise of Collective Intelligence. It is a rendering of the future that has arrived -- when the roles of producers and consumers are reversed: consumers become producers and producers become consumers.

On Monday, I’ll carry on with my observations about Howard Shultz ’s attempt to return Starbuck’s brand essence to its original sensuous character.

Our Brand Is Everything We Do

At one point I  in a recent client meeting considerable discussion was being devoted to “What is our brand?’ Participants were trying to define the brand in terms of “the promise”, “its personality,” and “its meaning.” Then, some one got it: “Our brand is everything we do!”

Starbuck’s Howard Shultz sees it that way. A year ago, he sent an email to Starbuck’s senior staff in which he lamented deterioration of Starbuck’s brand essence. Here is an abbreviated rendering of that email:

Over the past ten years, in order to achieve the growth, development, and scale necessary to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores and beyond, we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have lead to the watering down of the Starbucks experience, and, what some might call the commoditization of our brand.

Many of these decisions were probably right at the time, and on their own merit would not have created the dilution of the experience; but in this case, the sum is much greater and, unfortunately, much more damaging than the individual pieces. For example, when we went to automatic espresso machines, we solved a major problem in terms of speed of service and efficiency. At the same time, we overlooked the fact that we would remove much of the romance and theatre that was in play with the use of the La Marzocca machines. This specific decision became even more damaging when the height of the machines, which are now in thousands of stores, blocked the visual sight line the customer previously had to watch the drink being made, and for the intimate experience with the barista. This, coupled with the need for fresh roasted coffee in every North America city and every international market, moved us toward the decision and the need for flavor locked packaging. Again, the right decision at the right time, and once again I believe we overlooked the cause and the affect of flavor lock in our stores. We achieved fresh roasted bagged coffee, but at what cost? The loss of aroma -- perhaps the most powerful non-verbal signal we had in our stores; the loss of our people scooping fresh coffee from the bins and grinding it fresh in front of the customer, and once again stripping the store of tradition and our heritage? Then we moved to store design. Clearly we have had to streamline store design to gain efficiencies of scale and to make sure we had the ROI on sales to investment ratios that would satisfy the financial side of our business. However, one of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store. Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee. In fact, I am not sure people today even know we are roasting coffee. You certainly can't get the message from being in our stores. The merchandise, more art than science, is far removed from being the merchant that I believe we can be and certainly at a minimum should support the foundation of our coffee heritage. Some stores don't have coffee grinders, French presses from Bodum, or even coffee filters.

While the current state of affairs for the most part is self induced, that has lead to competitors of all kinds, small and large coffee companies, fast food operators, and mom and pops, to position themselves in a way that creates awareness, trial and loyalty of people who previously have been Starbucks customers. This must be eradicated.

I have said for 20 years that our success is not an entitlement and now it's proving to be a reality. Let's be smarter about how we are spending our time, money and resources. Let's get back to the core. Push for innovation and do the things necessary to once again differentiate Starbucks from all others. We source and buy the highest quality coffee.

The Starbuck’s story, from its mythic beginnings and legendary growth to its present day challenges contains valuable lessons for every marketer of every brand. In my next post I will offer a few observations about Shultz’s concerns and how he’s trying to recall Starbuck’s from the jaws of ordinariness.

 

Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times

Strategic Action #5 for Surviving and Thriving:
Operate with Transparency

Last month millions were horrified by a clandestinely filmed video of animal abuse at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. in California. The video showed cattle too sick to walk on their being prodded with electrical shocks and forklifts toward their place of slaughter.

Under USDA rules no meat from animals unable to walk on their own can be lawfully sold for human consumption.

Westland/Hallmark president and CEO Steve Mendell declared in a press release:

“Words cannot accurately express how shocked and horrified I was at the depictions contained on the video that was taken by an individual who worked at our facility from October 3 thru November 14, 2007

. We have taken swift action regarding the two employees identified on the video and have already implemented aggressive measures to ensure all employees follow our humane handling policies and procedures.”

One can only speculate whether Mr. Mendell was really shocked and horrified – or whether his shock and horror was over his operations being secretly filmed. However, with the ubiquity of the Internet, murder will out – no pun intended.

No more can we blithely assume that any action we take that is observed by another person will not ever show up on the Internet.

Welcome to the Age of Transparency.

Companies that Raj Sisodia and I write about in Firms of Endearment have learned that transparency is not as fraught with risk as hierarchically organized command-and-control organizations and their lawyers have long believed.

In the first place, an ethos of transparency is a vaccine against the kinds of executive cupidity seen in such iconic scandals as those represented by the names Enron, WorldCom and Tyco.

However, beyond that, an ethos of transparency strengthens employee loyalty and productivity. Privately-owned sneaker maker New Balance shares an uncommon amount of production and financial data with employees. This enables employees to gauge their performance. It’s apparently a more effective way of inspiring workers to higher performance levels than supervisors’ criticisms and commands.

New Balance makes more than 30 percent of its shoes in the U.S. with plans to increase that percentage. That is impressive given that sneakers can be made in China for 1/14 the hourly wage New Balance pays its U.S.workers. However, New Balance’s U.S.factories are the most productive sneaker producers in the world. Much of the reason for this, according to New Balance CEO Jim Davis, is the transparency of his operations to employees.

Organic grocer Whole Foods publishes everyone’s salaries to avoid corrosive rumor mongering about who is paid what. JetBlue teaches employees how to read the company’s financials so that they can better appreciate their contribution to its bottom line.

A felicitous consequence of operating with transparency internally is that employees do the same with customers, thus building greater trust between company and customer.

Transparency responds to rising expectations for authenticity in producer-consumer relationships. After enduring many decades of exaggerated company claims, customers are turning off in ever greater numbers to unauthentic messages. Additionally, everyday whole armies of consumers post go online to tell their stories of gaps between a company’s claims and its delivery.

A useful guide to operating with greater authenticity is Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore’s new book, Authenticity. Click on the book cover in the left column  to be teleported to Amazon where you can read about Authenticity.
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If you have the stomach for it, watch a PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)

Strategic Action #5 for Surviving and Thriving:
Operate with Transparency