CHAPTER 5

THE DISRUPTIVE MARKETER’S MINDSET

Punk Rocker, New Parent, Soccer Player

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things
differently from what other people were doing.

—HERBIE HANCOCK, jazz pianist

THE AVERAGE POP song clocks in at about three minutes and twenty seconds (3:20). How do I know this? Well, for one, a Bing search indicates that the average time a pop song is played on FM radio is between three and four minutes. Pull a cross section of about a hundred current pop music videos on YouTube and you will find they range from 2:40 to 3:59. Crunching the data, you find that the average time lands somewhere between 2:40 and 4:00, or around 3:20. That’s how long an artist has to convince you to download the song from iTunes or to open Spotify.

Divide that time by ten, and you get twenty seconds, which, according to the most recent study I could find, is the amount of time that most people actually spend watching a video. For videos, after the first twenty seconds, audience engagement wanes.

Now let’s think like a disruptive marketer and ask, “What if it isn’t a pop song? What if it’s hardcore punk?” Now we’re thinking differently. And in fact, twenty seconds is the perfect amount of time in which to make a point with a hardcore punk song, which can say everything it needs to in one minute or less. In addition, in a live setting there are distractions galore (stage diving, mosh pits, utter chaos) that prevent the audience from truly giving its undivided attention to any one thing.

Sounds a lot like modern life, right?

CASES IN POINT

BLUEPRINT FOR SUCCESS: A HYBRID SKILL SET

Hardcore punk is a blueprint for communication today. That is, people interested in the subject now drive the messages. Instead of anyone being able to start a band or a fanzine, now anyone can initiate a podcast or a blog. These Do-It-Yourselfers are a brand’s participatory customers. New parenting, too, is a blueprint for how business now operates. But instead of dealing with a fickle newborn, you’ve got to figure out how to reach fickle—and mobile—customers.

Soccer, in fact, is a blueprint for how marketing operates today. Instead of timeouts and planning sessions, modern marketers need to think on their feet in real time to keep up with the demands of customers and the marketplace.

Successful marketing no longer requires only one set of skills. In fact, some of the skills that once made marketers successful are actually detrimental. Age and tenure used to be badges of honor; today experience means little, as new trends and behaviors come and go daily.

While planning for the next year used to help in reaching a firm’s objectives, now when business is done changes all the time—marketing isn’t limited to a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday schedule. In fact, disruptive marketers know the best time to reach consumers is during the evening or on weekends, when they have downtime and are more likely to be in the mood to learn about and immerse themselves in your content. Yet, conventional marketers still operate when it’s most comfortable for them, without thinking about their customers’ lifestyles and habits.

I used to ask the hardcore punk bands, “Why did you form your band?” Many said that they simply wanted to try something different. (Note to self: try something different!) When Allison was expecting the baby, like other expectant and new parents I was always afraid that I’d do something wrong. New parents are constantly second guessing themselves. When I asked other parents about this, many told me I would simply learn how to adapt, based on the situation. (Note to self: adapt to the situation!)

When I ask soccer players why they enjoy the sport, most say (as I do), “There’s always something happening and you have to adjust your strategy in real time in order to be competitive.” (Note to self: think on your feet in real time!)

Lately, when I speak to marketers, all too often I am asked, “Will what you are suggesting work?” As someone looking to push the boundaries by executing more disruptive marketing, my answer is, “What’s your definition of success?” If the person can’t answer that, he or she shouldn’t even be in the business.

If you only do things when you know the answers in advance, your marketing won’t be very interesting and your company will simply fade away.

THE CULTURE OF DISRUPTION: TEST, MEASURE, ADVANCE

A disruptive marketer understands first and foremost that the creation of new ideas from intimate data analysis is what ultimately helps form the benchmarks against which to test and measure. Measurement gives you the ability to map your next steps. And your next steps move you forward with new product innovation, new ways to engage, new ways to use that engagement, thereby understanding and solving the new business mysteries with new solutions.

This is disruptive because for much of the twentieth century marketing was seen as a strategic investment. Companies did it because they felt they had to. There wasn’t much need for measuring results. In the twenty-first century, though, we have greater ability to gather, analyze, and act on data. Almost all disruptive marketing activities in some way enable testing and measuring.

This measurement means disruptive marketers, while relying heavily on creativity to stand out, must also depend on metrics to see if their tactics are helping them meet their objectives.

You should never say, “I think our advertising is working because profits are up.” Rather, you should say, “Forty-five percent of our content marketing initiatives drove leads that converted to $300 million in quarter one because we identified that our audience enjoys hip-hop, so we created a piece of entertainment with Nas in the content.”

To many of us, this is a new space, just as it was for those hardcore punk bands that were experimenting in 1986. Of course in 1992, a band from Seattle named Nirvana appeared to come out of nowhere with a brash sound many had never heard before. Nirvana was credited with altering the American pop-music landscape, although the sound was anything but new. It sprang from almost fifteen years of innovation by hundreds of bands that remained below the radar. Nevertheless, Nirvana got to carry a flag.

Though the outlier bands never got rich or found wider audiences, they did spawn a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations, and other subversive collective systems that helped reenergize American rock, giving it a DIY credo and producing a music that was deeply personal, emotional, challenging, and influential.

Disruptive marketers can learn from those early innovators about the importance of a DIY ethos to the creation of new marketing models and processes. In other words, we should all be acting like young punk rockers, constantly establishing new “scenes” while overthrowing old “systems.”

Similarly, we should be acting like new parents, taking things as they come and figuring out the solutions. While plans are wonderful, plans have to change because the externals around us change.

Our new world is both abundant and inattentive; therefore, we have to take more risks now. Disruptive and DIY movements pressure organizations to go beyond the norm, forcing them to diverge from the crowd, requiring them to blaze new paths in a world ruled by habits, hierarchy, hindsight bias, and normalcy.

The Shared Vision Meme Myth

Where does normalcy in business originate? And how does the disruptive marketer avoid getting caught in its trap? Much of normalcy comes from what is known as the “shared vision meme.”

Most companies assume that there is only one single and defined vision for the organization. This vision comes from its founder, the CEO, or upper management. It is expected that the rest of the organization will accept this vision and march to the same drummer.

We often read about the shared vision meme in the business sections of large news outlets. The New York Times wrote about Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, defining a cultural revolution at his company that was complete with laminated rules on how employees should behave. This was being done in the belief that rules push employees to lean in toward group-think and conformity, since it leaves no room for interpretation.

The disruptive world has an opposing view: having set principles makes an organization rigid and inflexible. And that’s the total opposite of the young punk rocker or DIY ethos. In reality, the highest-performing organizations actively promote dissent and flexibility in all areas, including product development and marketing. Unfortunately, not many companies subscribe to this ideology. I can name only a handful: Red Bull, Virgin Group, T-Mobile, Tesla, American Express, Google, and IBM. (Note: I didn’t mention Microsoft, Facebook, or Apple because although they build and develop extraordinary products, they use conventional marketing strategies.)

Companies such as Red Bull, Virgin Group, and T-Mobile don’t treat their employees as “resources,” “assets,” or “roles”; these characterizations dehumanize people and make robots of them. Robots don’t create thinking, feeling, emotionally driven stories, and they don’t build identifiable cultures that customers crave. In an uncertain, rapidly changing business world, making safe bets won’t provide much movement. Calculated risks don’t open up the eyes of customers looking for different products, innovative packaging, constant product updates, or left-of-center experiences.

While the theme of this book is that thinking and acting differently is the differentiating factor in marketing, I acknowledge that you probably don’t want to take risks. After all, companies that don’t take risks benefit most by staying the course. Right? Maybe not . . .

Let’s take a quick look at the top five U.S. companies, as rated by their employees:

1. Google

2. Bain & Company

3. Nestle Purina PetCare Company

4. F5 Networks

5. Boston Consulting Group

Now let’s list the top five companies based on market valuation:

1. Apple

2. Exxon Mobil

3. Berkshire Hathaway

4. Google

5. Microsoft

And the top five most innovative companies based on customer event experiences:

1. Bud Light

2. Nike

3. American Express

4. Microsoft

5. iHeart Radio

Finally, here are the five most popular products based on consumption:

1. Coca-Cola

2. Lay’s Potato Chips

3. PlayStation

4. Toyota Corolla

5. Apple iPad

Next, let’s cross-match these lists and note which companies appear on two or more. There are only three: Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

Those companies are among the highest valued, so it makes sense that their employees rank them high, their customers rank them high, and their products are bought in large quantities.

Now, let’s look a little deeper and ask a “what if” question. What if we looked at the top five valuated companies by market capitalization in 2015 again? Here’s the list:

1. Apple

2. Exxon Mobil

3. Berkshire Hathaway

4. Google

5. Microsoft

Now, how about that same list in 2006?

1. Exxon Mobil

2. General Electric

3. Microsoft

4. Citigroup

5. Gazprom

The historical data shows that energy companies have a whole set of new circumstances they will need to solve in order to remain relevant. Meanwhile, technology companies that enable us with communications are beginning to dominate the list, with even more companies forming in the tech sector as I write this. What great leaps of risk will these new companies bring to the new normal? Will these leaps be from a shared vision of group-think or involve bets against the status quo?

Look back at the 2015 top-five list. What if these companies don’t take risks moving forward the next ten years? Will they be on the list in 2026?

Risk to Learn

There is no real cause for failure in this new world of marketing. There are only things we can learn. There is more data available than ever before to pivot or pursue in real time with messaging, content, and experiences. Failure occurs for those who persevere on pride even when the customer user experience data informs them they should have concluded their experiment months ago. Some schools of thought welcome risk because trends are emerging and transforming at such a fast pace that there are more unknowns than knowns in the business world. We can learn from failure in marketing, but only if marketing involves everyone, not just the marketing department, as shown next.

THE NEUROSCIENCE OF SCREWING UP

In 2009, Wired magazine featured an article entitled “Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up” that addressed this very issue. In it, author Jonah Lehrer talked about how two lab teams were given the same problem. One of the teams was made up of single-subject experts; the other was people with different backgrounds and expertise. Which group do you think solved the problem more efficiently?

The group of single-subject experts took weeks to solve the problem by using a traditional method involving tests of various approaches. The diverse group solved the problem in ten minutes in an informal group meeting.

What lesson can we draw from this? For one thing, teams of “experts and insiders” can be marketing’s worst enemy. Because they believe there is only one approach to finding a solution, they tend not to accept outlying ideas. When marketing teams represent a cross section of disciplines, the problems are quickly solved and the solutions are often applicable to other areas of business as well. One reason industries are being overthrown is that they don’t allow outsiders into their inner circle to provide new ways of thinking.

The Wired article got to the root of what I’m discussing in this chapter. Marketing is about communication—but it’s not communication with people who look, dress, and think in the same way. To succeed in this new era of marketing, you’ve got to think and act like a punk rocker. You have to invite everyone to the party who wants to be part of something big. You have to stop thinking like an MBA in a suit and tie and instead dress down, simplify, and realize that everyone has some tools to help you with your marketing.

You need to find people who aren’t like you, and be inspired by the things they say, even if those things are weird. Indeed, outsiders shock us out of our cognitive boxes. To succeed in this future world of widely available free information, you have to escape the cookie-cutter mindset. You have to think like a prospect, a customer, or the target audience you wish to persuade and inspire.

The moment you place yourself outside the company and—from an empathetic viewpoint—think about how your products, services, and communications will be accepted by others, things will change. This is why it’s so critical that you uproot the tangles of your professional life every two years. You never want to get too comfortable in one position for too long.

CASE IN POINT

DESIGN THINKING IN DISRUPTIVE MARKETING

Tim Brown, author of Change by Design, describes design thinking as using designer skills to match people’s needs with market opportunity. The goal of design thinking is to reach an improved future state. In this regard, it’s a form of solution-based or solution-focused thinking: starting with a goal (a better future situation) instead of trying to solve a specific problem.

This approach differs from the analytical scientific method, which begins with a statement of the problem by defining all the parameters in order to create a solution. The design-thinking process stresses the “building up” of ideas, with few or no limits during a brainstorming phase. This freedom of thought reduces the participants’ fears of failure and encourages varied participation in idea creation. Think of it as a brainstorming session on steroids.

Hire More Generalists, Fewer Experts

The phrase “thinking outside the box” was coined to describe the brainstorming session. The practice aids in the discovery of hidden elements, ambiguities, and potential faulty assumptions.

So, if you’re a team leader who is a specialist, don’t hire only people like you. Hire generalists who can learn quickly a number of subject matter areas and who enjoy conducting marketing experiments. This is exactly what the music industry did in 1992. It was asking the “what if” question about transitioning from an era in which music moguls ruled the business to a new period with a global perspective. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was totally acceptable for a company to sign and ship music strictly within the United States. If margins were low, it was easy to make a profit. Yet in the 1990s, with the passage of NAFTA and other global trade measures (as noted by Thomas L. Friedman in his book The World Is Flat), there was suddenly a global marketplace with multiple audiences and wider opportunities.

Although in the twenty-first century it will be commonplace for professionals from one industry to take jobs in other industries, as mentioned earlier, twenty years ago such moves were considered anathema. Traditionalists in the music industry hated this management move, but many of those outsiders came with new ways of thinking, new processes, and new efficiencies.

In any business, people spend a long time learning about a particular specialty, with the goal of becoming an expert in that field. Usually we do this because we are rewarded for that expertise. In the music industry’s heyday, being an executive who signed enough artists who sold lots of records meant you worked your way up from an associate to VP, and ultimately to executive VP. You might even have been anointed president.

The troubling thing about becoming an expert, though, is that we become entrenched. We put on blinders, rendering us unable to see anything beyond what is happening directly in front of us. This makes sense from a biological perspective; as humans, we find it easier to partake in implementation thinking, which is the ability to organize ideas and plans in a way that they will be effectively carried out.

Implementation thinking, which is tactical, is the crutch of conventional marketers. Entrepreneur and philanthropist Naveen Jain, founder of the World Innovation Institute, doesn’t believe in expert theory:

I believe that people who will come up with creative solutions to solve the world’s biggest problems . . . will NOT be experts in their fields. The real disruptors will be those individuals who are not steeped in one industry of choice, with those coveted 10,000 hours of experience, but instead, individuals who approach challenges with a clean lens, bringing together diverse experiences, knowledge and opportunities.

Ask Yourself: What Could Be Possible?

If you expect to be deeply personal, emotional, challenging, and influential—like those early innovative hardcore punk bands that came before Nirvana—you need to push your boundaries. Being smack-dab in the middle of your industry doesn’t bode well for coming up with new ideas. That’s because your assumptions and inherent biases will always get in the way. Your thinking will be more transactional than conceptual, innovative, or intuitive. And it’s conceptual, innovative, and intuitive thinking that will move you ahead.

Before we move on to the next chapter, where I showcase how “tinkering” thinking can help build some of the best marketing ideas and movements, ask yourself this question: “What could be possible in my industry?” Not what is possible, or what will be possible, but what could be possible. Then ask, “If it does become possible, how do I market that future state?”

Here’s an example you can apply to your business: the smartphone and its search capabilities. Consider these five true statements:

1. I can search anywhere on a smartphone with or without a Wi-Fi connection.

2. I can use a mobile browser like Safari to conduct a keyword search.

3. I can use applications like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, or LinkedIn to conduct deeper vertical searches that go beyond keywords into particular fields of interest or for assets.

4. I can use Siri, Cortana, or Google Now to ask a voice-enabled search that will generate answers.

5. I can use near field communication (NFC) applications like Shazam to generate answers to questions by listening to what is around me.

Many of us use only the first two features on that list, but some of us use all five. Yet, if we are expecting to innovate our mobile marketing around technology and human behavior, and we are blinded by the current stars of our industry, what are the chances we’ll come up with something new? It’s going to be much harder than we may think, because our point of view is clouded by what we know—the familiar—which prejudices our judgment, just as those classic record music industry moguls were blind to innovation possibilities.

With that in mind, let’s generate a list of what could be possible to reimagine in this one industry sector:

I could search from a watch or glasses, or in the near future, any touch-enabled, “smart” glass surface, extending my smartphone into other sectors of the world.

I could search based on my behavior history from wearable devices that provide information without my having to enter keywords into a search box. My smartphone will send me reminders.

I could search based on software that knows what I’m feeling, turning my smartphone into a mood detector.

I could search based on location or beacon technology that knows where I am, knows what I like based on my searches and social signals, and sends me things that I may enjoy. Now my smartphone is a sensory detector.

I could search based on my physical health and what I’m ingesting. My smartphone becomes a health and wellness improvement center.

The biggest problem facing marketers today is that we’ve all been trained to think too much like marketers. As a first step in a new direction, consider inviting outsiders to help develop ideas—people who aren’t hampered by the same assumptions as you have. Mind you, these are not focus groups; these are not question-and-answer sessions with customers. These are brainstorming sessions with people from diverse backgrounds.

Mike Street, a close friend from the marketing world and producer of the SmartBrownVoices.com podcast, drives the following point home; it can help us all in our quest to reshape marketing:

I started my podcast, SmartBrownVoices.com, as a direct response to the lack of people of color [to whom] the media will talk . . . about marketing, PR, and digital growth. When I look at sites like GrowthHackers.tv, . . . of 153 interviews, there are no brown people. We work in this space and have big success, but no one wants to talk to us. And while people of color over-index on social platforms, the social “experts” that everyone talks to all look the same. So if your voice isn’t heard, you’re basically hiding. Social media has allowed everyone to be heard and to find those who will listen.

There are voices everywhere, and they all have a point of view. Listen to them.

Now that we’ve reimagined the role of a marketer in the twenty-first century, let us begin to understand how fringe activities eventually become movements. The best place to analyze this is from the vantage point of the DJ, thereby discovering how tinkering with two turntables can reveal new ways to enhance your marketing.