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The Death of Marketing
Marketing is under the microscope for good reason. it’s about to die. At least, marketing as we’ve known it. This is not mere doomsday cynicism from engineering-focused skeptics or I-don’t-trust-the-qualitative-stuff naysayers. “The future of marketing,” the CEO of a prestigious London advertising agency openly confessed to me, “is for marketing to no longer exist.” When I asked her why, she said matter-of-factly, “Because so much marketing is still just litter.” The fact is, there’s simply too much marketing competition, mostly delivered through one-way messaging. The average person is exposed to more than forty thousand messages a day. Litter indeed.
This CEO may well see her prediction come true, because there is perhaps no other function in the corporate array of specialties that’s undergoing as much transformation and automation as marketing. Gone are the days when a chief marketing officer (whose tenure, though on the rise to forty-five months from a prior average of twenty-three, is still briefer than that of anyone else in the C-suite) can rise above the rank and file with a battery of Cannes Lions-winning advertising campaigns, creative retail promotions, and well-balanced spreadsheets of media spend.
Today, intelligent data analytics are a more effective way to reach profitable consumer prospects than a bold creative idea sprayed like artificial snow across the well-groomed slopes of the mediasphere. Creative ideas melt away under the hot lights of big data, while big data, as we know, is forever. A new arsenal of real-time and near-real-time metrics—including Net Promoter Scores, customer satisfaction data, and pipeline tracking, coupled with marketing and sales automation software—has changed the marketing function almost beyond recognition. It’s no wonder some are calling for marketing to report to the chief information officer.
Data analytics, e-commerce, and social media have turned things upside down, as they typically do. The “channel mix” (as marketers refer to the array of modalities they use to deliver the business message) is more complicated and interwoven than ever before. Rest assured, as intelligent technologies continue to sweep through the enterprise, there’s no function that’s not going to have automation become a major efficiency driver. Marketing is today’s playing field for transformation; it is on the front lines of change because it faces consumers and their transforming demands, and it can and should be at the heart of value creation.
Here’s the dark secret about marketing today. No one is really sure what works. For every creative campaign that yields a measurable bump in sales, there’s another that has zero impact. Even highly viral and buzz-worthy marketing campaigns that correlate with rising sales figures are often bolstered with price reductions, which could be the real catalyst for volume pickup. There are so many levers, and new ones appear all the time (Twitter! Facebook! Vine!) with immediate claims of improved trackability and efficacy. Even the trademarked and near-sacred Net Promoter Score is under scrutiny as an effective success predictor by statisticians and management experts alike. And even new stalwarts like search engine optimization are frequently disrupted by updates to Google’s algorithm.
Historically, the marketing department dreamt up ways to add value to a basic product, to make it easier for consumers to choose your product over your competitors’. Clever messages, jingles, and slogans were designed to distract potential buyers from whatever it is they were doing, to get their attention, and stick in their minds. It’s fun to look at vintage images of major cities and see such an abundance of what, to our eyes today, read as beautifully naive product proclamations. Like the colorful din of shouting traders in the commodities futures pit at the Chicago Board of Trade, the marketplace was a cacophony of shouted announcements and blaring reinforcements—all communicated in one direction, of course—from the company to the consumer. By the early 1970s, as both product choice and leisure time grew, the marketplace became more competitive and more discerning. In response, marketing began focusing on identifying key messages and “big ideas” that would create a sense of memorable and emotional differentiation in the customer’s mind. But even then, there were fewer consumers, fewer products, fewer channels, and consequently fewer choices and less clutter.
Over the past decades, the cacophony has moved online. And it’s gotten even more chaotic.
Going Online
I was literally in the room as part of the team that moved marketing from the physical world to the more pervasive digital world. Did you know that it was Wired magazine that planted the flag—or rather, the banner—of digital marketing on the web, where it has, to our surprise, remained fixed in place ever since? The place: early 1990s San Francisco (of course). Our South Park offices were far from glamorous, then. It was a dicey neighborhood. We were a true bootstrap start-up. There were bullet holes in the warehouse windowpanes. Occasionally, in the late hours, we’d hear a rat scuttle across the floorboards.
Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, the magazine’s founders, had stated from the very first issue of the publication that their intent was not merely to create a magazine, but to build “a twenty-first-century media brand.” The intent was to explore the media application of the emerging technologies that we covered in the print pages, and use these new technologies to experiment with the distribution of content. In effect, we were inverting the famous proclamation of the magazine’s patron saint, Marshall McLuhan—for us, the message became the medium, and not vice versa.
And so it was that, as we came to understand the soon-coming possibilities of the web browser, Louis and Jane called a meeting to discuss how we might put some of our content on a web page. For some time, we’d been publishing articles on an AOL bulletin board. This new browser, Mosaic, would give us an opportunity to create something digital and desktop-accessible that looked more like the magazine and behaved more like commercial media.
But how would our online content be funded? After all, there would be costs associated with design and coding and hosting—just as there were costs associated with printing and distribution. What would the business model be? After all, no one had put commercial content on the web before. It was still the province of academia and government.
We decided to transport the tried-and-true media business model from the physical world to the virtual one: we would include advertising. The next question was, what form should this advertising take? A button? A distinct full or half or quarter page? Remember, the web was not yet a consumer channel. There were no interface or content design standards. It was unclear how we should even designate space. We knew that in order to convince an advertiser to pay for whatever space we gave them it would need to be highly visible, yet we didn’t want to interrupt the content that the reader was really there to see. And so it was decided that a slim strip, like a piece of signage, could fit neatly on the top or the side of the page, like part of a frame. It wouldn’t be too hard to code, it wouldn’t be too distracting, but it would be visible enough that we could persuade an advertiser to try it.
The strip needed a name. Ad strip sounded naughty, but not in a good way. Then someone said “flag” and there was a buzz in the room. It sounded positive, but political. Someone else said, “What about banner, like a parade?” The strips did, we all agreed, look like banners. And the ad banner was born.
Unlike all advertising that preceded it, the banner was more than a message. It was the world’s first dynamic link from media content to the advertiser. We delivered a customer directly to the advertiser for the first time–which meant that for the first time, advertisers had to figure out what to do with this new, more intimate and interactive dialogue. In one fell swoop, one-way advertising was over. The wall between business and customer was about to crumble.
None of us thought banners would last for two decades. We believed it was a temporary patch, and that far more sophisticated ways of marketing on the web would quickly supplant our cute and convenient banners. Looking back on that meeting, I must say, it was an extraordinary moment. We knew we were venturing into something historic. And two notable things happened immediately afterward. There were two resignations. One resigner left in fury to rejoin academia, stating (prophetically, I might add) that we’d just contaminated one of the last true frontiers for authentic human expression and connection with the most crass form of commercialism, advertising. The other resigner leased an office space in the same neighborhood, realizing (accurately) that we had just given birth to a multibillion-dollar industry, so he founded the world’s first digital advertising agency.
Fast-forward to search engine optimization—which has replaced “the big idea” as the new holy grail. But just as we grew used to brainstorming SEO terms in our conference rooms, this contemporary discipline is being upended as Google updates its algorithms. It is emblematic that the iconic binoculars-shaped headquarters, designed by Frank Gehry in the early 1980s for then-iconic advertising agency Chiat/Day, are now inhabited by Google, as a Venice Beach-side extension of the Googleplex. The cafés of Venice Beach, California, have long been frequented by the kind of young, casual, confident people who know they’re working in a glamour industry. Today, the glamour industry is search technology, the infrastructure that holds all communication—and seemingly, our lives—together.
This puts a big fat question mark next to the old trope of creative big ideas as communication drivers. Can I tell you how many marketing executives of a certain age still talk glowingly about Apple’s big idea of “Think Different,” and use it as an example of iconic marketing even today? Yet it’s well over a decade out of date. Most people were still using fax machines when that campaign ran in 1997. It’s time to lovingly consign it to the history museum. I find it a classic example of change resistance that big ideas, at least as we used to think of them, remain the highest aspiration of most blue-chip advertising agencies and many of their clients. Because it bears noting that Apple itself doesn’t deploy big ideas in their marketing anymore. They put them where they belong—at the heart of their product strategy.
Whatever your beliefs about mortality, there is life after death for The Employees Formerly Known As Marketers. Because healthy, profitable business relationships and breakthrough value creation and delivery in the Conscience Economy will require a set of lateral skills and aptitudes. Right and left brain, working in alignment. Meaning making, story telling, communicating in a relevant way with different functions, creativity, competitive foresight, human insight, relationship management, social interaction, organizational psychology—these are the kinds of talents that every future-proof business will require at the crux of value creation.
Many, if not most, of these skills sit underutilized and marginalized in marketing departments today. Decades ago, management guru Peter Drucker made an observation that was years ahead of its time: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
Not marketing as we’ve known it, though, with its outbound-communications mandate. It’s time to banish that to the proverbial dustheap of history. Meet its successor: the role that is chiefly responsible for the nexus of value creation in the Conscience Economy enterprise. Meet your new CMO: chief matchmaking officer.
The Matchmaking Mandate
The mandate of your chief matchmaking officer and her team is fourfold.
1. To identify those people most likely to connect with your brand, buy its products or services, work for you, advocate for you, create value for you, innovate with you, and help your business grow. In other words, the mandate is not just to identify your market, but the entire holistic ecosystem of human relationships that create business value.
2. To learn and understand everything about these people—how they think and feel about the world as well as about your business, what they value, their deepest hopes and highest aspirations, their spending power, their social influence, where they are, how their needs and feelings and behaviors change depending upon where they are—and the best, most personal, least creepy and invasive way to connect with them.
3. To apply those learnings about needs, desires, and demands, both latent and explicit, to every relevant operation in the company. This includes everything from corporate strategy to product innovation and positioning to government policy to communications, but especially to business innovation. The goal is ensuring that human, social, and environmental requirements become the guiding specifications for the next round of products, services, and operating procedure—which are, in the Conscience Economy, part of the business product itself.
4. To establish and sustain the connection—to make a successful and lasting match—between people and your business, creating long-term, trusting relationships that drive value and profit into the enterprise while generating positive impact in the wider world.
Straightforward stuff, right?
For a matchmaker, it’s all in a day’s work. Because unlike most other corporate functions, matchmakers understand and deal in two often opposing strains of information that drive business success—the rational facts and the emotional truths. Matchmakers are that rare combination of right-brained and left-brained. They can interpret data without being in its thrall. They can confidently apply creative intuition and emotional intelligence to translate a range of factual and measurable inputs into meaningful and actionable insight. They understand the transformative power of storytelling, and they are masters of behavior-changing communication. They are a personified mash-up of the creative communication skills embodied in marketers of yore and the future-friendly analytical skills of information-obsessed digital natives.
In the Conscience Economy, matchmaking is never, ever considered a cost center. And it’s definitively not an internal service provider that’s brought in at the end of the value-creation cycle. The things that matter most to citizens of the Conscience Economy—the things they are willing to spend the most on—are meaningful, emotional, and enlightened. Which is not to say that the Conscience Economy isn’t driven by pragmatism. Zoom out—way, way out—and we can see that the drive for collective self-actualization is sensible indeed in order to preserve a healthy and thriving society, but it’s also the apex of emotional intelligence. The matchmaker ensures that this emerging and growing human need is satisfied and that it is, for the business, profitable.
So what about the traditional four Ps of marketing: product, positioning, promotion, and pricing? Dead and buried? Hardly. They will undergo a shape-shift and a re-sort.
The Five Cs of Matchmaking
As capabilities and customer expectations of convenience, engagement, and meaningfulness have advanced, the matchmaker has a new set of considerations and competencies to apply. Exit the Ps, enter the Cs. Five of them: context, conversation, clarity, cohesion, and creativity.
Context
In the Conscience Economy, people have a firm grasp (literally—it’s in their hands) of the potential contextual capabilities of technology, and, consequently, expect personalization and convenience. Yet the daily utility of contextual technology is still in its embryonic stage.
Marketers—and particularly those with a media-planning bent—used to create (and I suspect many still do) what we called a touchpoint plan. I’ve personally sat through endless revisions of such plans, which typically presumed a rather predictable and linear “consumer journey.” This journey proceeded through a narrative cycle of phases borrowed from the sales funnel, for example “awareness,” “consideration,” “product trial,” “purchase,” “out-of-the-box first use,” and “advocacy.” These phases would include moments like waiting at a bus stop, watching TV, or driving past a billboard. At particular “touchpoints,” the marketer would drop in a piece of strategic marketing, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, creating a pathway of clever, synchronized, gradually building messages, all the way to the point of sale, where there would be ever more hard-driving sales messages and a particular selling experience. All very logical. Except that it isn’t anymore. And hasn’t been for a while.
It’s a cheap shot to even mention that no living person you or I know has ever ventured out on a “consumer journey.” But if he did, it would start and end in two places only: online or in a store. We research the products we buy, extensively. And if we don’t buy them then and there, online, we go to a store to sample, try on, try out, browse, touch, taste, and even, sometimes, to socialize with other people who are doing the same thing. Everything else is interruption, disruption, and in the background.
Now seems like a good time to mention that, having spent many years as a marketer, I happen to be a fan of outdoor and transit advertising. When it’s done right, it can actually add design, beauty, and wit to the built environment. It can also measurably increase awareness of your offering—but only when it’s designed simply to do that. There aren’t many companies willing to invest a significant outdoor media budget to provide a mere flash of information, and even a bit of brightness and charm to enhance the everyday. Use it for more than that, though, and you’ve gone from smart to creating marketing litter.
But, oh, the number of times I’ve sat in meetings where the mock-ups for every poster, every billboard, every online banner—every piece of communication—were debated ad infinitum because of the company’s desire to load up on all kinds of information about as many product features as we could cram legibly into the layout. Those rich and informative product messages belong online and at the point of sale, and absolutely nowhere else.
Because context is everything. And when you’re waiting for the bus or driving down the highway, if you even happen to be thinking about buying something, you are not searching billboards to find it. You might, on the other hand, be searching on your mobile device. It’s remarkable how this basic logic (a reasonably bright third grader could grasp it) escapes even seasoned executives.
The matchmaker understands far more than a mere media lay-down. She understands the multiple layers and conditions that comprise a person’s context. Because context is not only geospatial, it’s temporal, emotional, and circumstantial. It’s not only where you are, it’s how you are. It’s emotional and circumstantial. It includes the time of year, the time of day or night. Are you hungry? Is it hot out? Are you with friends? Are you in your car? Where are you going, and why? Every context yields a need to state that your business may have a better way of satisfying.
Here’s the tricky part, and the reason that there is a delicate and sophisticated art to matchmaking in context: there is nothing more spooky or more of an immediate turnoff than a company message that gets delivered in such a way that it demonstrates we’re being watched.
A contextual strategy starts with understanding the most likely conditions for influencing a sale. But it goes broader and deeper than “you need it now so buy it now.” The matchmaker leverages contexts for consumer advocacy and promotion. Contexts for up-selling or cross-selling. Contexts for educating someone on how to best use your offering. The next generation of media strategy will be contextual strategy, which will seek to match you, the consumer, with the very thing you want and need at that moment, at a good price.
The matchmaker creates new kinds of real-time promotions based upon fluctuating demand and location. A bit of artificial intelligence that analyzes real-time behavior and contextual conditions (the day, the time, the temperature, etc.) will make it increasingly possible to connect in-the-moment needs with exactly the right offering. Even pricing is contextual. A new umbrella is worth more the moment it starts to rain. But matchmaker beware: conditional and contextual pricing can be hazardous to your brand if it manifests as exploitative and greedy, as ride-sharing service Uber learned when it experienced a full-on social media backlash because it raised prices for rides on rainy Friday nights, resulting in fares upward of $200 for routes that would regularly cost far less.
Conversation
I’m jetlagged in Beijing, downing my third black coffee in an enormous conference room on the top floor of the company’s Chinese head office. My colleagues and I have flown in from European headquarters, not only to break bread with the local marketing team but to share with them the newest iteration of company strategy. The renewed strategy, designed to inform product innovation as well as marketing and sales, is driven by fresh insights about an underserved but deep and globally distributed human motivation—the desire to live a more adventurous life.
Because this desire for adventure is a new type of need, one that the company is utterly unused to meeting, the strategy is, shall we say, controversial. Indeed, there are pockets of skepticism across the company about our findings, and resistance abounds. So we’ve not only arrived to talk in person; we’ve brought in a bunch of external people, potential customers—some of whom are loyal to our products, but most of whom aren’t—to share their own everyday life stories with us. In Mandarin, of course, so I sit close to the translator. She’s almost breathless as she tries to keep pace with the enthusiastic conversation that’s happening in front of us.
I must admit, when the group of customers enters the room, my heart sinks a little. They simply don’t look like people who are going to get fired up about living adventurously. They are neither fashion-forward nor athletic. They aren’t flashing bold, charismatic smiles or standing tall with entrepreneurial conviction. They’re regular Beijingers. But then they start to answer questions from my local colleagues. And the room catches fire.
“I really want to turn my life upside down and travel the world,” says a meek-looking young woman in a pale pink sweater. “I like to do things differently than anyone has ever done them before,” says the slightly pudgy guy in wire-rimmed glasses. “Every weekend I can get away, I choose a different mountain to climb,” says a neatly dressed, professional-looking woman, “and sometimes I get my husband to come too.” “I’m teaching myself to cook Italian food because I like learning new things,” says another customer. And then the money shot, from what looks like the youngest person in the group: “I want my life to be an adventure every day.” This, in China, a civilization with centuries of non-individualistic, pro-communal bias. But also a society where the world is changing so fast that life indeed is an adventure every day.
It’s not that the insights themselves are so profound—indeed, this is exactly why we’d built the strategy we are there to advocate. But the conversation changes everything—it shatters walls of resistance and opens up possibilities for reinvention.
Business is built on relationships, and relationships are built, strengthened, and sustained through dialogue. This has never been more true than it is now, with social media channels and real-time conversation still growing. Customers expect a high degree of interactivity and engagement—on their own terms. Matchmaking happens best when the right conversation facilitates a closer connection.
Your business and brand are part of an ongoing dialogue, and the matchmaker’s job is to ensure open participation, to create conditions and circumstances for interactive communication. Not only online, but everywhere, including product demonstration experiences and events. The matchmaker will consider how the merchandising environment itself becomes a more conversational space, where sales staff can converse with customers and where consumers can socialize with one another.
It’s about more than using the conversation to sell. It’s about harvesting insights from the interaction to discover and recommend new product features. The conversation itself is useful and value generating, but the insights from the dialogue have a second life, deeper in your business, as they drive the optimization of new sources of value, whether it’s a more efficient delivery system, a new product feature, a line extension, a potential retail location, or a more effective promotional message. There’s little need for old-school market research when the matchmaker is in near constant dialogue, channeling a continuous stream of customers’ opinions, desires, and needs into the organization. Matchmakers are tasked with building and maintaining a communications system—both digital and interpersonal—that ensures that real-time insight makes its way to those corners of the enterprise where it can be swiftly converted into value.
If this sounds too jargony, I’ll try it in plain English. The moment a matchmaker (or his software) catches a pattern of conversation that suggests people are frustrated with wait times for customer service, that input goes immediately to the customer service department, not into a report. The moment a matchmaker sees people getting worked up about an impending bill that’s on the legislative agenda, it gets channeled to communications, where the company’s point of view in light of said bill gets immediately channeled back out to the public. It’s about removing latency, staying current, and constantly positioning the organization at the forefront of what is most important to the people it serves.
The matchmaker is both the host and the catalyst of these conversations. And the conversations are not only about products and brands. In the Conscience Economy, the matchmaker engages people in those issues most on their minds. The matchmaker jumps in on those conversations that are already flourishing across society, but also builds programs that provide a reason for conversation about an issue, an aspiration, a dream, or an urgent development for which your business happens to have a solution.
A blend of social technology and intelligent analytics will play a huge role in managing, synchronizing, and harvesting applicable insights from myriad simultaneous interactions. But not every conversation has to be technologically enabled. Personal, physical interactions are the most powerful conversations of all, and the matchmaker will regularly introduce people—in person—from various functions to the real-life customers your business serves. As we saw in Beijing, there’s nothing quite like getting to know someone in person for changing your point of view.
Your goal is not only to be a company people talk about. Your goal is to learn from what you hear and apply it, so that you’re a company people love.
Clarity
With so much more to monitor, clarity is more important than ever before. Because the Conscience Economy places value not only on what your product does, but on how you produce it, the impact your operations have on the world, how you treat your people, your political biases, and more, there’s never been more to communicate. But we can only handle so much—our lives are overloaded with information as it is. So the matchmaker must distill a broad range of facts into an initiative, a brief, a recommendation, or a report that is not only meaningful but actionable.
In an era of exponentially proliferating data and analytics, the matchmaker is a sense maker. The matchmaker filters, streamlines, and interprets insights and foresights for the rest of the organization. Matchmaking is not just monitoring data and content, but making the inherent revelations of that data clear and applicable.
Clarity includes transparency, that chic term that the Global Language Monitor—a service that does exactly what its title says, it monitors language globally—puts way up on its current business buzzword list. The matchmaker is responsible for ensuring that truth is shared in all directions, for ensuring that authentic information cuts through the clutter. It’s vital to identify those things that are going to be particularly meaningful to each stakeholder. In the Conscience Economy, this includes sharing how the business works, the impact of its operations, and suggestions for using its products to better the world. This content will not only be sourced from within, but from the community of customers, suppliers, producers, and fans who are engaged with your business.
Real-time digital capability enables matchmakers to experiment with a range of different messages to assess, adapt, and deploy those that are most effective. This doesn’t negate the importance of powerful communication and great writing; in the Conscience Economy, the more emotionally astute your message, the more powerful it will be. But we now have a means of getting better feedback sooner, to make the adjustments necessary to drive not only a successful sale but effective outcomes across the enterprise. In other words, the matchmaker potentially holds the key to the continuous improvement of all business functions, from HR to operations. Driving sales is foremost, but every aspect of organizational life will benefit from real-time feedback and clear communication.
If information is the lifeblood of contemporary enterprise, great matchmaking will be the heart and circulatory system of business, pumping useful, clear, truthful information into every muscle of the body, strengthening it and enabling it to move forward and grow.
Cohesion
Cohesion means getting things (and people) to stick together and work together. The matchmaker builds and sustains mutually advantageous, profitable connections between the business and its customers. By analyzing data, while leveraging intuitive insight and foresight, she discovers patterns and opportunities in the continuous conversations she manages and facilitates. She identifies those people who are most likely to buy from you, to promote you, to best represent you—and develops the means to engage them, close the sale, and help them connect with others on your (and their) behalf. At any given moment, people need or desire something, and the matchmaker has the intelligence and the empathy to know exactly when to provide the right product at the right time.
Cohesion is also about maintaining communications and brand consistency, so that you’re recognized and attractive no matter where a customer is. A matchmaker establishes, and when necessary rigorously enforces, the protocols that ensure everyone is executing plans in concert. This includes the alignment of globally developed and business-critical identity and strategy with local cultural nuances and local sales needs. This is the classic dilemma of international marketing: the right balance between global and local control.
The Conscience Economy is more decentralized than any that precedes it, and thus the notion of “control” is in many ways outdated. This is why cohesion is a more useful aspiration than control. Local markets and global headquarters are not in opposition; and it will become increasingly easy for them to be in constant conversation. The matchmaker ensures that frontline input is truly at the core of everything emanating from the head office. Meanwhile, local matchmakers must acknowledge and embrace the idea that, for the local customer, a significant amount of the perceived value of a global offering is in the fact that it is global; therefore, alignment with international standards is vital. Local consumers who choose global brands are making a choice to be part of something international, to be part of something bigger.
There is no such thing as the “right” amount of local adaptation. It’s a question of economic efficiency. Utilizing international assets rather than re-producing over and over again is obviously more cost effective than broadly distributed origination, and in an increasingly globally astute world, customers can see your brand from multiple international angles. Fragmentation doesn’t build confidence; coherence does.
Indeed, as long as consistency standards are kept, brand behaviors are adhered to, and a program is recognizably the voice of one company, locally generated programs can be the most effective of all.
Perhaps the most important aspects on which your matchmaker can ensure coherence are social and environmental impact, the causes and issues that people care about, and your product offering. By driving innovation and generating a coherent set of product specifications that emerge from the matchmaking process, the matchmaker can ensure cohesion between your brand and everything you do and sell.
Creativity
There are whole tomes on the science and the art of creativity. I will ruthlessly hyper-summarize from them: unlike most other quantitative business processes, creativity can neither be automated nor rigorously engineered. Creativity can only thrive in a context where ideas can flow, prototypes can be made, inspiration is abundant, and risky ideas can be explored without consequence. Creative talent requires a very different leadership and management style than nearly every other function in the enterprise. And creativity needs a different type of physical environment as well. A creative studio is as different from an office as a park is from a factory. This is why so many companies outsource their creative processes and creative output to agencies and design firms. Outsourcing ensures that the process is, in effect, protected from the exigencies of daily business.
This is a shame, because creativity and its offspring—innovation—are your primary sources of business value. Outsourcing creative execution makes sense, but outsourcing value creation itself makes no sense. In the Conscience Economy, the product is the message. And thus, the matchmaker is responsible for creating a safe and inspiring environment within the enterprise that enables creative idea generation and innovation to flourish, from physical space and creative tools to a stream of stimulus for new ideas.
The matchmaker also works closely with your financial team to generate rich, meaningful, and actionable integrated reporting, connecting the right people and functions inside and outside the organization with the right information from both inside and outside the organization. Because the matchmaker is as fluent in analytics as she is skilled at storytelling, she is able to lead the translation of data into meaning.
In the Conscience Economy, the rich overlap between product features, production processes, and social impact is the source of differentiating sales messages, and thus, the matchmaker holds ultimate responsibility for product innovation and design. Because she is driving the conversation with customers, she can feed learnings directly into value creation—product innovation, design, user interface, sales messages, and more. The matchmaker translates business intelligence and real-time customer insight into a clear definition of product and sales messaging requirements. Great matchmakers are organizations’ ultimate champions of innovation. The ultimate goal: to create new ways of meeting social and environmental challenges and embedding them in the brand offering. Positive impact is the primary guiding principle for creativity.
Innovation is increasingly a collaborative and collective process. The matchmaker’s most powerful approach to innovating business value will be to facilitate the sharing of true stories and rich experiences—about your products as well as your business processes themselves—that move people and bring them together for common cause. By creating meaningful reasons to buy, matchmakers will increase customer desire for your products and services, as well as the improvement of our world.