CHAPTER 6

THE GENIUS OF TINKERERS AND “TEMPORARY” MARKETERS

Change is inevitable, and when it happens, the wisest response is not to wail or whine but to suck it up and deal with it.

—DANIEL H. PINK, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future

IN THE LATE nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large bands and orchestras performed most popular music. Beginning in the 1950s, things changed. Now, four or five individuals came together and formed a rock band. Then in the late 1970s, the DIY punk ethos shook things up, and anyone could pick up a guitar and form a band.

While some young, revolutionary artists were picking up guitars, others picked up synthesizers, whittling down a four-member band to two people on stage—usually a vocalist and a synth player. Via sampling and sequencing technology, they could re-create all the sounds of a band themselves. If you think the way music was performed would stop at that two-person band, though, you are incorrect. Today, DJs on stage play prerecorded music.

In the same way as the art of DJing changed popular music, the disruptive marketer will forever change how marketing operates. This will happen by ushering in analytics, design, and philosophy in place of MBAs, brand marketers, and traditional business studies. You see, the best movements never really begin as movements. They begin when great minds begin tinkering to find solutions to problems that challenge them.

If I had to pick one DJ who tinkered above the rest, I’d head back to the borough that housed the studios of WEAF-AM and that ultimately gave birth to DJing as an art form. That borough is the Bronx. That DJ is Grandmaster Flash.

Born Joseph Saddler in 1958, Grandmaster Flash is considered the pioneer of modern-day hip-hop DJing. And Saddler was the ultimate “tinkerer.” He studied many other DJs and began to experiment with some of the skills he saw them using to produce entirely new creations.

What was Saddler’s most important creation? The backspin technique. The DJ plays the record on one turntable at a normal number of beats per minute (BPM), and then quickly spins the record backward to create a whirlwind effect; then, using a mixing board to toggle between the two audio sources, he bumps over to the beat of a new track on the second turntable.

When Grandmaster Flash combined this trick with another called scratching (originally invented by Grand Wizzard Theodore), his DJ sets took on a performance aspect that had previously not existed in the world of DJing. He made the DJ a performer, not just a human jukebox.

Instead of playing a record, cueing a record, and playing another record, Flash formed an entirely new idea based on a platform of ideas that had come before him. In fact, he embraced and took tinkering to a whole new level.

TINKERING AS A STRATEGY

Saddler’s innovative spirit of tinkering can be applied to marketing. Let’s say your organization is debating whether to do a search advertising campaign or a social media campaign. If the discussion boils down to an either/or choice, well, you’re not tinkering enough. The tinkering mind would use both solutions. They are complementary, not at odds. The social helps capture awareness, while the search captures the intent generated from that awareness. If your marketing has been reduced to templates and scorecards, with a rigid structure and no means to draw outside the lines, you’re not tinkering.

Tracking your spending is important, of course. You have to know where the best place is to invest your marketing dollars. However, allocate at least 10 percent of your marketing budget for campaigns with a zero ROI. These experiments will help you identify future trends, so ultimately you do get ROI. It’s a lot easier to test on a small scale now (even if you can’t track every expenditure) than it is to play catch-up later.

Alec Foege, author of The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great, best explained tinkering in the world of marketing in a 2012 piece for Salon:

At its most basic level, tinkering is making something genuinely new out of the things that already surround us. Secondly, tinkering is something that happens without an initial sense of purpose, or at least with a purpose quite different from the one originally identified. Tinkering also emanates from a place of passion or obsession. Lastly, tinkering is a disruptive act in which the tinkerer pivots from history and begins a new journey that results in innovation, invention, and illumination.

So again, I ask you a question: When was the last time you tinkered when developing a marketing plan?

CASE IN POINT

We’ll stop the story here. I don’t need to explain the outcome or what happened in the next five years. The point is that when I started tinkering, I had no revenue goals in mind. I just wanted to break even, but more important, I wanted to create word of mouth. Money wasn’t as important as growth—growth of my name and growth of my events.

Marketing folks rarely think these considerations are important in a world mired in analytics, attribution, and revenue, yet they’re relevant to any startup—and even to the big players who run the risk of falling out of favor because legacy names mean little to new audiences.

TINKERING AND THE VALUE OF INDIRECT INFLUENCES

There was one nugget I didn’t tell you about. In 1992, there was no way to forecast how many people would come to your event; all you could do was hope. Hope, however, is not a strategy. There’s an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 in which one of the characters calls an 800 number to attend a secret party. (Remember that I mentioned earlier how M. Night Shyamalan was influenced by a Nickelodeon TV show when he wrote The Sixth Sense? The same is true of marketing, by which I mean you should never shut yourself off from anything because you never know what might inspire your next creative idea or help you find a way to measure impact.)

Today the 800 numbers provide event details. But there is something else that those numbers could give you: the total number of people who called and hung up. A close friend, Jeff Boyle, and I created a rough algorithm. We noted that for every seven calls we got, one person would show up to an event. So, if we received seven hundred calls, we were going to get one hundred people. It wasn’t an exact science, but it was pretty close. The point is that our tinkering got us to use data that others had ignored and we unlocked new opportunities; in this case, we could track our marketing effectiveness.

Other DJs in the late 2000s used what they had learned from similar tinkering, along with new technology to create a worldwide movement. The scene they built became the most powerful, still active youth culture on the planet. Electronic dance music (EDM) is now mainstream popular culture that has spread throughout the world. And it’s all rooted in the modern art of DJing, initially created by tinkering.

Tinkering has helped build and market some unique businesses on the web. One example is a social-platform-meets-blogging-network-meets-creative-suite called Tumblr.

CASE IN POINT

EDUCATION’S INFLUENCE ON LINEAR THINKING

Until about the age of twelve, we are rewarded in school with passing grades if we are able to recall information presented on multiple-choice tests—the same kind of tests that many students and their parents are now rebelling against because they don’t measure the brain’s lateral abilities or even begin to predict future success.

Susan Engel, professor of psychology at Williams College, wrote about curiosity in children and how it may affect them when they become adults and work in fields like marketing:

The research in my lab shows that far from nurturing curiosity, schools seem to repress it. The pressures to deliver information, hone skills, stick to the plan, and avoid the unknown work against a child’s natural curiosity. However, it needn’t be so. Classrooms could be greenhouses for curiosity. Questions could be encouraged and guided, exploration could be at the center of the curriculum, and rather than being pushed to the side, children’s specific interests could be fostered. Given how central curiosity is to learning and to human progress, why not cultivate it?

When we enter our teen years, we tend to put a lot of emphasis on what others think of us. We look for “social proof,” also known as “informational social influence,” a phenomenon whereby we adopt the actions of others in an attempt to reflect appropriate behavior in a certain situation. This sways our actions because we crave receiving “likes” from those around us as reinforcement of our ideas. The downside of this phase is that it constrains us; it makes us cautious about accepting new ideas and presenting our ideas to others.

By the time many of us begin our first jobs, the traits of social proof are so ingrained that we risk becoming averse to breaking through these boundaries. Instead of exploring new disruptive ideas, we get stuck continually asking two questions:

Are people going to laugh at me for such a thought, message, or experience?

Are people going to get angry or disagree with me for such a thought, message, or experience?

NONLINEAR THINKING’S IMPACT ON DISRUPTIVE MARKETING

Disruptive marketers seek to validate learning by getting people to laugh at their messages or to disagree with them. This approach is corroborated by research showing that people share things that make them laugh or make them angry.

While companies don’t generally like controversial people or controversial points of view in their ranks, they will function at higher levels when they hire disruptive marketers to encourage the two types of messaging—humor and controversy—that receive the most customer feedback.

The hiring practices of many marketing organizations push in the opposite direction; they exclusively recruit analytical minds. In a CMO.com study, Kimberly A. Whitler, professor at the University of Virginia, dissected chief marketing officers who were either very analytical, very creative, or both. Whitler found that

CMOs with both analytical and creative skills are more likely to work in firms with stronger marketing capability. Balanced CMOs—that is, those with both right- and left-brain training—are more likely to work in firms with better marketing capability than either analytically trained or creatively trained CMOs. This speaks to the importance of being able to analyze and use insight to change consumer beliefs and behavior.

The study also concluded:

CMOs with primarily an analytical background are more likely to work in firms with weaker marketing performance. This is likely surprising to many CMOs and CEOs, but it shows that only having an ability to analyze is not enough. Converting insight into strategies, plans and actions that impact the customer is equally important and requires skill. This is a cautionary tale to CMOs, CEOs and executive recruiters to not overweight analytical skills at the expense of creative skills.

While many think products with zero emotion or artistry can be built and grow to achieve mass adoption, we know that such products will never be accepted by a mass audience. The CMO.com study confirms this. Imagine the iPhone as a square, clunky metal box with BlackBerry-like keys. It would have no allure. What if the PayPal site had only text, no images? What if a Tesla vehicle were shaped like a big steel box? Would you use it just for its battery power? Doubtful, if another creatively designed product was to come along and make you feel more human and valuable.

Disruptive marketers are one-brain, 360-degree, holistic thinkers with multidimensional possibilities. We have the ability to create art and crunch data. To learn mathematical algorithms and write beautiful stories; to create action and visual appeal from unorganized sets of data.

This is the attitude and these are the skills you need to adapt to the changing world. It’s a simple question: How do you meld diverse areas of thinking that have in the past operated independently? How do you synergize subject-matter areas into something brand new, like the DJs who fused two records in that early ’90s midtown Manhattan club?

Disruptive marketing is truly a blend of tinkering, psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, art, design, math, lateral thinking, predictive analytics, APIs, and measurement. It is not enough for a marketer to be all analytical or all creative—to be a search engine marketer or a graphic designer, to be a photographer or a coder. The marketer should be all of those things, and more. Viewing the world in silos is a linear, rational, and totally conventional way to approach marketing. And life.

So, how do we break with convention? One way is to flip convention on its head by creating and fostering an environment where everyone is or becomes a marketer.

THE END OF THE MARKETING DEPARTMENT

David Packard, cofounder of Hewlett Packard, said, “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” He was right. Have you ever been a temporary worker? Better yet: What if you became a temporary worker in the next year? What would you do? What would you specialize in? What skills would you need to learn?

If you work for an agency, you’re always a temporary worker. You keep your job as long as you retain business. Come to think of it, aren’t we all temporary workers, since we all depend on selling goods or services in an uncertain economy?

For many years, marketers usually held full-time positions in organizations where they could live happily ever after—as long as they made no mistakes. Even in books about growth hacking, the hacker is the lone full-time marketing employee at a startup. Many marketing professionals who write books usually assume that all readers are permanent workers.

This isn’t one of those books. In fact, I believe that having too many people too close to the product and the projects hurts marketing at many companies. That’s because many permanent marketers can’t escape their innate bias; they get too close to the product.

In the agency world, most employees are treated as temporary. In this way, employees stay on top of their game with out-of-the-box ideas. This is essential in an economy based on creativity and imagination.

Granted, many vibrant economies, such as that of the United States, depend on permanent workers who receive generous benefits packages that include health care and retirement plans. Even though disruptive marketing is best when generalist professionals are temporary, our current pro-austerity system doesn’t provide well for that. Nevertheless, the temporary generalist model works best for a disruptive marketing organization.

Contrary to what some believe, companies hiring temporary or contingent workers isn’t a new model that arose out of corporate cost-cutting in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession. The practice of using independent contractors has roots that go back centuries. Indeed, there was a time when all workers were essentially “contingent workers,” who hired themselves out to employers to perform a job or a service for a matter of hours, weeks, or even years, depending on the scale of the project. This changed with the industrial revolution, when manufacturers needed workers with specialized skills and so they increasingly began to hire full-time employees to work exclusively for their companies.

The assembly line was the main impetus for growth in permanent workers. Businesses ran on the economics of supply and demand, which included the labor pool. When the United States emerged from World War II with a surplus of labor and great demand for consumer products, there was a swing toward the corporate model, with knowledge workers as prized employees. Pushbacks in more recent years, with subsequent economics shifts and increased outsourcing, have reduced the ranks of permanent workers with cognitive knowledge, and now companies that want the best ideas need to bring in outsiders.

Not every company needs disruptive marketers, but when and if one does, having an old-style marketing department that is filled with entrenched specialists unwilling to execute new ideas won’t help it reach that goal. The flexibility of temporary marketers is an advantage to these companies.

The Advantages of Temporary Marketers

Temporary marketing professionals, unlike full-time marketing executives, can easily bring the “marketing is not a department” philosophy to the organization. I first read about this philosophy in the 2010 book Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. If you haven’t read this book, buy, borrow, or steal a copy today and read it. It will teach you a lot about what work—and especially disruptive marketing—will look and feel like as the twenty-first century moves along.

Some of the lessons for disruptive marketers are:

Everyone is now a “marketer.” With the advent of communication platforms, no one team owns marketing anymore. In fact, the best companies realize that their customers now own the marketing outright. Employees simply measure the customers’ pulse and design engagements to help prevent word-of-mouth churn and stalled feedback loops.

Marketing is a 24/7, 365-day activity. Of course, you don’t stay awake forever, like a robot. Software as a service (SaaS) and insights as a service (IaaS) are the disruptive marketer’s friends. With tools like these, there’s no need to hire lots of specialists.

Every time someone uses your product, it’s marketing. The tech world often forgets this principle. “Oh, we’ll fix that next week.” If so, then it’s bye-bye ten thousand customers. If you can’t build or maintain a good product, don’t build one at all.

No amount of marketing will save poor products. As I learned working in the music industry, “you can’t polish a turd.”

Customer identification surveys and polls that measure brand value are vanity metrics. You’re only as good as the next time a customer uses your product and tells their social media connections about it. No amount of brand marketing will help in this area. Brand marketing is a linear practice that made sense when communications were one-way and your value proposition was scarce. Now, products and services are in abundance.

Five Major Shifts That Changed Marketing Departments

In the past five years, there have been five large developments that have impacted the way we think about a marketing department.

1. The enormous increase in available data. Forget having no budget. Data is everywhere as long as you know how to access it. A search on Bing, Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as a plethora of other channels gives you varied information about what is going on in the world and what people are discussing. If you dig deeper, and have the budget, there are many tools to help you pull together various metrics to build predictive marketing models. I use a number of them, from Cision to Traackr, but have looked at other platforms, including Spredfast, Sprinklr, Hootsuite, Sprout, and Little Bird. Ten years ago, none of these tools existed. And we’re continuing to see access to data increase even as the cost plummets.

2. The increased access to mobile platforms with API integration. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, and other platforms provide unprecedented access to billions of users, which not only helps you acquire new customers but also helps you activate, retain, and educate them over time. The number of these platforms is accelerating, and so are the ways companies can integrate with them to effect growth.

3. The larger scale and greater speed of technology. Today companies can reach a billion customers on a variety of interconnected devices. With this ability comes higher expectations about your company’s and your product’s growth. Conventional tactics, however, are too slow. Take a class on deploying APIs before you take any class on advertising and/or branding. When people in your organization ask about an API’s ROI, tell them that determining ROI for an API is still something people are trying to figure out (just like ROI in social, digital, and other channels).

Measuring ROI on an API is not a simple calculation; it requires that you consider everything from the pricing of the API, which in many cases will be free, to how it could impact your business strategy. APIs are deployed for different reasons, including the ability to partner with other companies, to extract customer data, to enter new markets, to reduce the time of on-boarding new sellers, to collaborate more effectively with partners, and to establish a new business model. ROI for APIs is not a one-size-fits-all calculation.

4. The merger of technology and marketing. Tools like Optimizely, Hubspot, Kissmetrics, and Marketo have made things that were previously hard a lot easier. Pilots that used to take weeks with web analytics can now be deployed in hours. But to make the full use of these tools you still need some solid technical knowledge. That is why the disruptive marketer is part IT, part artist, and part visionary.

5. The rise of emotional intelligence as a required skill. This factor is one with the largest impact, although the term is still fairly new. Created by John D. Mayer, of the University of New Hampshire, and Peter Salovey, of Yale, emotional intelligence (EI) has come to be defined as “the ability to accurately perceive your own and others’ emotions; to understand the signals that emotions send about relationships; and to manage your own and others’ emotions.”

Jennifer Moss studies work culture. She is cofounder and chief marketing officer for Plasticity, a Toronto-based software-as-a-service company that helps organizations tool up their culture with happy and high-performing individuals. She is also the 2014 Stevie Awards’ International Female Entrepreneur of the Year. Clearly, Moss is no stranger to the emotional toils of business. Moss believes culture is the most powerful marketing tool that many businesses have failed to embrace:

The best places to work have the most significant work cultures. People don’t see this. It’s a very subconscious feeling. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book Blink; we can sniff out authenticity. I 100 percent believe that culture is the new marketing. Airbnb has customer experience and chief of people roles. When employees are in a thriving work culture, customer engagement increases; however, when employees are unhappy, their customer service decreases.

During my talk with Moss, questions about culture ultimately led to another trait important to disruptive marketers: EI. “We’re going back to the old way of doing things,” Moss said when I asked if the skill is important to marketing.

High emotional intelligence by marketers is extremely important. In this new information age, machines and tech took over for hard skills. Emotional intelligence represents a desired soft skill that will drive technology creation and development based on the needs of people. Marketers will ultimately have to drive this because they are the voice for people.

While centering on EI and who has a better handle on those traits, I asked Moss a question that some may find controversial: “Do women—often shut out from leadership roles at companies—have better emotional intelligence skills than men? And, if that is the case, will they be better marketing leaders in the future?”

Moss doesn’t believe one gender has better EI skills than another, but she gives women the upper hand when it comes to being more emotionally expressive—something that definitely is better for team building, bonding, and the ability to sense how customers are feeling, based on their body language or tone of voice. However, these skills are all learnable.

Moss added, “Your DNA decides your personality traits but happiness traits like empathy and hope . . . are both highly malleable traits.” I then asked Moss if businesses are taking EI skill building seriously.

“You have these superemotionally intelligent people burning to lead. We’re going to see the same thing here with EI. Those organizations that fail to identify it as essential may be in trouble.” According to Moss, companies with cultures that foster a people-first attitude will best withstand the disintegration of the marketing department. “Advertising will still exist,” she said,

. . . [b]ut [the] true leadership in companies [comes from] C-Suite execs who understand what resonates with people both inside and outside the company. . . . Your employees are your foot soldiers. The internal champions must become external champions. You start seeing companies with open accounting books and transparency. It will be people who are your marketers without a marketing title that will be the most valuable.