PREFACE

DISRUPTIVE MARKETING WAS written by someone who is curious about and fascinated with how business, human behavior, technology, and communications intersect, and how they are shaped by the world around us. I am a nonconventional marketer because I am unconventional by nature. I love B2B marketing and empowering businesses to think beyond the ordinary. If you ever meet me or get an opportunity to hear me speak, you might think I was an artist, a painter, designer, DJ, or drummer in a rock band—not someone who often wears a suit while trying to sell marketing solutions. But you wouldn’t be too far off, either—I have been all of these at different times in my life.

My fascination with business disruption is based on my upbringing and career trajectory. I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. For those who haven’t heard of it, for many decades it was home to a pretty big business called Bethlehem Steel. When my late father, Frank, moved to Bethlehem from Pittsburgh in 1964, Bethlehem Steel was a $575 million a year enterprise. By the time he approached retirement around the year 2003, the company was gone.

Many say that the issues leading to Bethlehem Steel’s demise involved a number of factors, including labor costs, pension costs for its retirees, the price of steel, and decreased demand for industrial steel. Yet, what Bethlehem Steel ignored in the 1980s and 1990s while it toiled in reorganization battles was that specialty steel manufacturers, or “mini-mills,” were producing steel at a lower cost. In some respects, Bethlehem Steel was disrupted because it didn’t adapt its thinking and processes to the needs of its customers—a common tale in disruptive innovation.

In 1998, while living in New York City and working in the music industry, I read an article in Music Week about a technology called MP3. This was at the peak of physically distributed music products. Millions of compact discs by top artists were shipped to customers weekly, to the tune of $15 billion annually.

That Music Week article heralded the beginning of the end. Coincidentally, the top-grossing film in 1998 was Titanic. You couldn’t pick a better metaphor for what was about to occur. Napster dawned in 1999, and solved a problem that the record labels had failed to address. In its most elementary form, Napster was a music discovery sharing service. Sure, people were downloading songs they had no intention of buying, but that’s partly because the music industry forced customers to purchase a $17.99 CD with eleven bad songs in order to get the one good single. It was Mafioso Tactics 101 by shrewd business moguls who had learned their trade in the streets and clubs of New York City. Who cares about the end product? Their attitude was, “As long as the spreadsheets don’t have any parentheses around the numbers, that’s all that matters.”

The industry—slow to understand customer sentiment—treated fans like an automatic bank deposit instead of its lifeblood, and became the enemy when it sued Napster in an attempt to halt the behavior.

It was too late. Like most “sue innovation,” or what I’ve dubbed “Californication,” movements show us, it’s impossible to sue away behavior once it’s embedded in people’s consciousness. The consumer won, toppling the industry in which I thrived from 1996 to 2002. Later, a guy by the name of Steve Jobs, who started and ran this company called Apple, used the Napster model to usher in iTunes, which became the common and acceptable way to purchase music.

Fast-forward to 2013. I was immersed in the world of the advertising agency. While analyzing some large sets of customer-experience data for one particular project, I noticed that the math didn’t add up. Agencies and clients were doing things that were directly at odds with customer behavior. It had been known for some time—and more recently noted in Mary Meeker’s 2015 Internet Trends Report—that people in the United States spend around one-third of their daily screen time interacting with television and two-thirds with digital media like smartphones. Yet agencies and brands were investing a mere 8 percent of their ad spending on mobile devices, with a much larger allotment (around 41 percent) on television. While television ads allow storytelling in the form of a thirty- or sixty- second spot, the industry was ignoring the fact that user behavior was trending toward an entirely different medium!

Agencies, many of which were built around the TV-industrial advertising complex and billed their time much like law firms to generate revenue, did what most industries do when faced with disruption: instead of being curious and trying to learn new things, they clung to the only way they knew how to keep billings rolling into bank accounts. In economic terms, they tightened the reins of scarcity. They failed to pivot their model, which would have meant doing things very differently from how they had operated for several decades. Many of the top leaders at these agencies simply blamed the radical shifts in customer behavior on “bad data,” rather than trying to find new and unique solutions.

The pivot for many disruptive marketers as we near the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century is to take our trade in-house. Seeing the writing on the wall (or the lack thereof) for the decaying agency model, in 2013 I jumped on a cross-country flight to Seattle, where Microsoft waited. This environment is the most interesting in my career to date (in the tech industry, no one is ever safe).

If you enjoy uncertainty, join a tech company or startup. There are no guarantees of success because the business models are built on cognitive capital and imaginary products that come to life via code. In fact, tech companies are probably less safe than others from disruption if they approach business plans with a conventional mindset.

In twentieth-century businesses, the past usually informed a future or ongoing strategy that allowed marketing and management specialists to command the helm. But in the twenty-first century, a business’s future success will be designed more than replicated.

The best minds are already doing this: data punks, designers, and creative hybrids, who are more likely to have backgrounds and skills in design, video production, psychology, and statistics, use social business models and insights instead of hierarchical org charts, while immersing themselves in the customer experience and creating culture.

This is disruptive marketing. This is the new normal.

I never wear ties at work. They stifle creativity. (I learned this from Richard Branson, who owned a company I had the pleasure of working for from 1999 to 2002.) I don’t sit at a desk at Microsoft. Marketing is best performed by getting out in the world and observing things around you; that’s because marketing is about people, not faceless data.

I love buying and reading physical books (and though I also love digital, the best way to create digital word of mouth is post-digital, which I write about in chapter 8). My background doesn’t resemble the traditional path many take to get into the field of marketing.

And I hope after you read more of this book, you will begin to move away from such linear career trajectories, marketing plans, and inefficient organizational hierarchies.

Some of today’s best marketing minds don’t come from the world of marketing. Many don’t have MBAs. To be very successful in this new world, you don’t need to follow that path.

In writing this book I didn’t want you, the reader, to find it irrelevant if, for example, you don’t work for a big company, as I do. (I don’t like it when business writers neglect to personalize their books for their readers’ diverse backgrounds.) And I don’t want you to think this book is only for marketers. While the vast majority of marketers will find the information relevant and, I hope, inspiring, I believe that everyone should read this book to adopt and possess the hacker personality and emotional intelligence required to succeed in business.

As an outsider and culture jammer who now works for a Fortune 500 technology company, it makes little sense to write a book about how MBAs approach marketing with “top of the funnel” models, customer journeys, and value propositions. While there is value in that for some who want the “multiple-choice test,” my approach is more like a “blue book” exam. I’ll leave the rigid answers to questions of customer segmentation, customer journeys, funnels, and the science of the customer to conventional marketing books written by conventional marketing gurus.

To really enjoy and apply this book to your everyday life I want you to practice something you (not to mention your manager) may think is anathema to the world of work: take twenty minutes a day to not look at anything on your phone, computer, or even in the physical world that could distract you. Go on what some call the “digital detox.” While you’re unplugged, your thoughts should roam as freely as possible and not be cohesive. Imagine anything you want, but remember to ask yourself, “What if?” And also remember to tell yourself, “If only . . .”

Calling on the practice of everyday imaginative thought puts counterfactual thinking to great use. This means thinking of ideas that are clearly not based on data, facts, or reality. Imagine what it might be like to walk upside down for a day, and ask yourself what the advantage would be from that view. Or walk outside and close your eyes and pick a random color. When you open your eyes, try to find as many of those colors as you can in the real world. Or sample my favorite game I play with my two daughters: Create a random animal and give it a name. Then ask yourself, What would that animal do? What would it eat? Where and how would it sleep?

Better yet (and I do this quite a bit), put yourself in the shoes of someone not like yourself at all. If you’re a white male who lives in San Francisco, be a black female in Lagos, Nigeria. What does she see, sense, and feel? What would she do for a living? What technology would she be using? What systemic obstacles might she face in her life? This can be powerful and make you realize how innate biases stay rooted in our culture.

Such exercises are important because the power of imagination and empathy is more critical in the world than ever before. As a result, it is even more necessary for people to pay attention to their thoughts, beliefs, actions, and experiences. No thought, debate, or dream is a waste anymore. There is a massive amount of power in being enthusiastically inefficient.