CHAPTER 9

SKILL #1:

ALWAYS BE LISTENING

No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow.

—JAN KOUM, WhatsApp cofounder

HAVE YOU WATCHED one of the many video clips on YouTube that show scenes from the classic film Glengarry Glen Ross, based on the David Mamet play? One of my faves shows Alec Baldwin as Blake. Blake is a real estate salesman sent by corporate goons to drum up more business from the tired and whipped sales team. In one of the film’s most intense scenes, Blake castigates the team with this harsh, unmotivating speech:

You got leads, Mitch and Murray paid good money. Get their names to sell them. You can’t close the leads you’re given you can’t close shit. You are shit. Hit the bricks pal and beat it because you are going out.

The team complains that the leads are weak. Then, during a profanity-laced, pompous back-and-forth, Blake explains how sales and marketing work, using a simple, second-grade analogy. Pointing at a blackboard, he says, “ABC. A Always, B Be, C Closing. Always Be Closing. AIDA. Attention, Interest. Decision. Action.”

This is the core of classic interruptive marketing. Yet it rarely works.

INTERRUPTIVE MARKETING VS. DISRUPTIVE MARKETING

Interruptive marketing is dead. Just don’t tell Ken Wheaton, managing editor of Advertising Age. Wheaton wrote a 2015 op-ed lashing out at disruptive marketers’ dislike of interruption as a strategy:

Media fragmentation is our reality. It’s not going anywhere. I’d like to think that at some point it will stabilize. And it probably will. But sometimes it’s hard to believe, especially when you read stories about time shifting, cord cutting and a generation of children who think they can just watch whatever they want whenever they want on that thing Mommy keeps in her purse.

Wheaton may be hostile to disruptive marketing because the industry he is in—publishing—is itself going through many changes. Wheaton continued:

The funny thing is these disruptors have a big problem with interruption. That’s the problem with traditional marketing. It has the gall to “interrupt” consumers’ daily lives with lame things like TV commercials and print ads and direct mail. Left to these guys, we’d go from a rather polite “Pardon the interruption” aimed directly at a consumer, to talking about them behind their backs and saying things like, “We’re gonna disrupt the hell out of them. Gonna scrape up all their data and stalk ’em around the web. They’ll never even know they’re being advertised to.” One of the more damaging things the disruptors do is convince marketers that there’s something almost shameful about old-school advertising and marketing methods. You can’t interrupt. You have to attract.

Wheaton’s suggestion that data and retargeting make marketing disruptive is wrong. His argument doesn’t cut to the core, which is that as marketers we are ultimately trying to relate to people via culture. Relating to people requires social cognition. It requires a conversation about aspects of the world that go beyond mere selling or interrupting in an attempt to capture attention. It goes beyond profit-and-loss columns on an Excel spreadsheet. Wheaton noted in his op-ed that if companies want to market effectively, they must stimulate people to buy something. Yet while sales are always a barometer of success, disruptive marketers believe it no longer is the barometer of marketing.

Disruptive Marketing’s New Criteria

Many disruptive marketers emphasize growth first, sales second, as I have mentioned earlier. Others emphasize conversation first, sales second. Putting this into the context of the conversation I had with Frank Rose, this means that marketers and salespeople must become disruptive, because it allows individual prospects to string together evidence and find the solution they are seeking. But what if customers don’t string together to reach a solution a company likes? In disruptive marketing terms, that’s not failure. It’s more data pointing to what you can do to improve your services!

Advertising doesn’t follow this approach because it doesn’t speak to people. It yells at them. Wheaton’s analysis of interruption is better left to an era in which “spray and pray” was the main strategy of the media-buying culture: First, you spray your message everywhere to interrupt an audience, and then you pray that the audience will buy your product.

Targeting audiences on the social networks and targeting intent by using search advertising have obliterated the need for “spray and pray.” Disruptive marketers don’t need to reach a mass audience because they don’t need to appeal to a mass audience. We target our audiences with a microscope. We believe that the best way to gain your audience’s attention for a relevant discussion is by inverting Blake’s Glengarry Glen Ross model. That’s ABL: A Always, B Be, L Listening. There’s a reason our species evolved with two ears and one mouth.

Listening in the world of marketing is more powerful than speaking.

The Different Impacts of Talking vs. Listening

The ABL approach to closing a sale puts emphasis on listening rather than on talking. Data gives disruptive marketers the indicators of what people want, so the companies can go back and make, redesign, or enhance their products. Looking solely at the messaging is an antiquated view of marketing.

Susan Cain noted this powerful philosophy in her must-read book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Cain says what most conventional marketers seem to forget: that in the Western world, we have metamorphosed from a “culture of character” to a “culture of personality.” In this new culture, impression—how someone thinks about you or how you are perceived—is more important than character. When applied to interruptive marketing and advertising, this performance indicator shows that by always talking, always being on, and always at hyper speed, marketers can force an audience to listen and then lead it to the buy.

My argument against that approach in our noisy world draws on Cain’s study: we have an innate bias in our social world that leads us to believe talkers are better leaders, although the facts show otherwise. She reported in her book:

We perceive talkers as smarter than quiet types—even though grade-point averages and SAT and intelligence test scores reveal this perception to be inaccurate. In one experiment in which two strangers met over the phone, those who spoke more were considered more intelligent, better looking, and more likable. We also see talkers as leaders. The more a person talks, the more other group members direct their attention to him, which means that he becomes increasingly powerful as a meeting goes on. It also helps to speak fast; we rate quick talkers as more capable and appealing than slow talkers.

If Cain’s view is correct, in the future the top brands will rarely speak; instead, their audience (their customers) will be the talkers and we marketers will be the listeners, making and building products based on loudly announced needs. Rebecca Carlson and Eric Drumm agreed that, based on Cain’s data, the way companies use social listening is ineffective.

“How many times have we spent hours and hours pulling a listening report and then presented a sixty-page deck and the client goes, ‘Thanks for putting this together,’” Drumm said, sounding discouraged. “Then in your next talk with them . . . when [you] ask if they [took action based on] any of the insights, they shake their heads no. Even though you have actionable insights in the listening report, nothing ever changes.” In other words, brands just keep talking, fearing that if they stop, we will forget what they had to say.

Carlson thinks many companies don’t even use the art of social listening:

In terms of business insights, I would hope companies would use social listening to inform business decisions. I worked [for] a client [which] only targeted men in their messaging. We showed [them that] 30 percent of their audience was female and [that it] was likely that more women were buying their product for the household or had an interest in a particular area . . . the product inhabits. Data can disprove cultural inferences and innate biases, which is always a good thing.

Data, Emotional Intelligence, and Social Listening

There is still a big issue with social listening. Because of the technology, it isn’t a definite science. “Even when people do take a hard look at social data, they take the human element out of it,” said Drumm, adding:

Tools have a hard time reading sentiment or figuring out human culture. Yes, it is labor intensive but you can’t just look at the numbers, you have to use your emotional intelligence to take the temperature of what’s really happening and data analysts aren’t that human. . . . Plus anybody can pay Sysomos a monthly fee and learn items about their query strain regarding their brands. When brands are thinking about data, they think that they have to pay IBM to use a Skynet server for $200 million. That’s not true; data is cheap and it’s only going to continue to get cheaper.

Data is in abundance and it is becoming cheaper to obtain via APIs. Yet, not a marketing conference goes by when I don’t shake my head in disgust at least once. It usually occurs during the first day, in the first presentation following the keynote. The slide goes up and there in bold glory is a linear customer journey with buzzwords like engagement, conversation, and amplification. The presenter loudly proclaims why it’s so important to engage with your audience, but I can’t help feeling that even though they want to show connection with their customer, their approach is no different from the advertising shilled by conventional marketers.

These customer journeys, and the marketers who present them, tend to simplify the rationality of human beings when it comes to communication design, impulses, actions, reactions, and triggers. As noted by several behavioral economists, including Richard Thaler, author of Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, it doesn’t really work that way. No, duh.

Disruptive Marketers Advantage: The Cognitive Whisper

One thing about conventional marketing that always falls short is lumping people into target segments and then pushing a button to publish content that the marketer assumes those folks will see. The conventional marketer doesn’t understand the enormity of online activity. Figure 9-1 is a dramatic illustration of what typically happened online in just sixty seconds during the years 2012–2014. It increased exponentially in just those three years.

Figure 9-1: What Happened Online in Sixty Seconds, Years 2012–2014

Because of all this activity, the disruptive marketer gains an advantage in using the cognitive whisper. Yes, you need to publish content and stories that reach your desired audience. But before you hit Send, what is the design of the story you’re about to publish? If your attitude is, “This is what I want to tell the customer; this is the narrative we want to state; this is the message we want to CONTROL,” well, consider the value of transparency, authenticity, and collaboration. These are the three traits customers want from brands; they do not want to feel they are being preached to.

ABL (Always Be Listening) captures customers’ moods. You can find out what they’re seeking. You can pinpoint the problems they cannot find solutions to.

And then you can reach them with contextually relevant and personal content.

HOW THE ABL APPROACH WORKS

Are you using the ABL approach? Let me show you how it really works.

I ran listening reports on the types of businesses and organizations that were asking questions about transitioning their marketing. The organizations identified included:

Fortune 500s—Businesses trying to transition from a legacy model to a modern marketing model using Big Data for more real-time audience engagement.

Midsize businesses—Companies trying to figure out what marketing techniques and strategies to adapt to their fast-growing, yet—from a historical perspective—young organizations.

Startups—Businesses trying to figure out which marketing tactics will be the most effective for them. They may not have much in the way of budget or resources, but they do have enough organic growth that they must move rapidly from inbound to outbound marketing.

Here are the job titles of those asking these questions:

Fortune 500s—Marketing managers, marketing directors, CMOs

Midsize businesses—Marketing directors, search advertising managers, content strategists

Startups—Growth hackers

Next, I found data concerning what those individuals liked in terms of content within the larger social web:

• Content marketing

• Big Data

• Social media

• Podcasting

• Video

• Corporate storytelling

• Art

• Culture

• Technology

• Sports

• Retail

• Travel

• Finance

• Women’s issues

• Volunteering

I created a list of news sites that this audience followed on Twitter:

• Bloomberg

• Bloomberg West

• Harvard Biz Review

• Linkedln Pulse

• Fast Company

• New York Times Tech

• BBC Tech

• HuffPostTech

• BuzzFeed

• CNBC

• Marketwatch

• Vice News

• Mashable

• TechCrunch

• Fortune

• Marketplace

• Forbes

• Recode

• The Verge

With this data (and a lot more) came creative ways to pitch new stories. For example, there is little need to use an ABC (Always Be Closing) model that shouts “Advertising!” if what you are selling isn’t what people are seeking as demonstrated by their actions (based on social data). There are alternative angles and approaches that don’t deal with marketing per se, that are still attractive (art, culture, technology, etc.) and could be used more effectively.

In the future, with the ABL (Always Be Listening) model, disruptive marketers don’t need to do real-time marketing to be effective. I know, you may be scratching your head because you keep reading that real-time marketing is the freight train to which you need to hitch your locomotive. But that train left the station years ago. In fact, the warning is: Don’t do it! Marketing is moving into an on-demand world. As a disruptive marketer, you need to be prepared for it.

ON-DEMAND MARKETING

Digital marketing is about to enter a new territory, one that will be a lot like Netflix binge watching. When you find a film series you want to watch, you opt in and watch the entire series, beginning to end. Thanks to the consumer power that’s been brought on by mobile devices, marketing is headed in the same on-demand direction—and it’s not just always on or always real time. It’s more contextually relevant and responsive to an individual’s opt-in for marketing experiences that cut through the clutter with micro targeted precision.

Helping usher in this on-demand scenario are search technologies like Bing, along with mobile apps and the social web, which create an anything-at-any-time environment for users. This has made product information plentiful. Plus, it’s more than marketing material that is pushing this on-demand behavior. When you book a flight on Expedia, it’s productivity and convenience, not a marketing action. Other sectors of the digital world, just like other business models in industries beyond marketing, are major influencers of what experiences people expect from these organizations.

And this is just the beginning. Before us lies a landscape of mobile growth and the Internet of Things, of connected devices and productivity applications like Cortana, Google Now, and Facebook’s Moneypenny. We are moving into a world where searching in a box will feel antiquated as we perform searches by voice, gestures, and images. In fact, searching may become a whole new world of UGC, as some engines allow photos to be uploaded into large pools available for public use (think Shutterstock meets Flickr meets Wiki). The iOS interface already allows instant image sharing between handsets via the cloud, as well as the ability to pay for purchases with a thumbprint.

But the biggest development that will transform marketing is wearables. We have yet to see its power in marketing, but we are transitioning to a point where products like Apple Watch will change people’s experiences—and ultimately affect marketing. Instead of a website that sells clothing by featuring photos of the product, people will be able to try on the product virtually to see how those jeans look before they use a right swipe to share that image with friends and obtain their feedback. Only then, with enough high ratings, will they move into purchase mode.

Over the next several years, we’re likely to see the consumer experience radically integrated across both physical and virtual environments. One technology that’s gaining traction is near field communication (NFC)—embedded chips in phones permitting exchange of data on contact with NFC-tagged objects. Beacon technology will know when you enter a particular store; then based on your browser history, the NFC technology in your phone will display items that are in your size and color preference.

Indeed, immersion will come into play in the world of on-demand marketing in ways that you may never have imagined.

CASE IN POINT

These scenes from Olive’s life illustrate the on-demand world that disruptive marketers need to be building and programming right now. Many of its features tap into human behaviors that have been created by a mobile on-demand world:

Customer urgency

Customer immediacy

Customer contact

Customer personalization

Customer simplicity

Customer interaction (to help shape data footprints and improve productivity)

Data integration (for better decision making)

These also tap into content, such as music, that we don’t often think of when it comes to consumer engagement. One of the few universal-branding languages, music is hardly ever used by many brands unless they have licensed it for a television advertisement. But disruptive marketers realize that different modes of content can act as forms of currency to build “feelings” with their audiences. To win over those on-demand customers, you must know them, including what they expect and what works with them. Then, you need the ability to reach them with the right kind of interaction. Data lies at the heart of efforts to build that understanding—data to define and contextualize trends, to measure the effectiveness of activities and investments at key points in the consumer decision journey, and to understand how and why individuals move along those journeys.

But don’t get all worked up over Big Data as your savior. Remember that data represents the actions of people, and people still have to put that data into action. Thus, we have the need for disruptive marketers to shape the bright, shiny world of Big Data into what makes it truly powerful: insights.