Experiences- the 7th Era of Marketing

by Robert Rose

  As Stephen Denning says in his book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century:

  “Radical management is about mobilizing the energies, spirit, and ingenuities of workers and focusing them on delighting clients and to go on doing it time after time in a sustainable way. To accomplish that, managers have to abandon their faith in backroom engineering and enlist the workers in taking responsibility for co-creating a new, more productive, and more fulfilling future.”68

  The ultimate benefit of this approach is the ability to measure and evaluate experiences—not the teams creating them. It provides the incentive for teams to work together to optimize the experiences across all channels, and to actually work together to repackage, reuse, and redistribute content and data for common goals rather than siloed goals.

  Balance the Portfolio of Experiences

  Every investor needs to perform regular portfolio rebalancing. Some of the company’s investments in content-driven experiences will be big gainers, some will be moderate successes, and some will fall flat on their faces.

  This periodic content rebalancing is a critical piece of moving back into the inspiration phase—with a concerted effort to have low, medium, and high-risk elements in the experience portfolio. This risk doesn’t always equate to the simple cost of the project. Your team will almost assuredly develop expensive, but low-risk platforms, and inexpensive but high-risk initiatives.

  Jonathan Mildenhall, former vice president of global advertising strategy at Coca-Cola, explained that the company used a 70/20/10 investment strategy to manage its content portfolio. When he sat down with Robert Rose in November 2012, the two discussed how 70% of the budget goes to content that they “must produce,” 20% goes to content that is “slightly out of the box,” and 10% goes to “high risk” creative content. Rose then asked him if that 10% number translates to a dollar figure as well. Mildenhall responded that it didn’t:

  “Actually it’s quite the opposite. It’s much cheaper to produce the 10%. But, it takes much more creative time to actually come up with. This is where I, admittedly, have a bit of an advantage. The Coca-Cola brand is one that any number of other brands has a desire to align themselves with—from other consumer brands to technology providers who want to innovate and explore new frontiers.

  “We are increasingly open to these ideas. If you think about it, Coca-Cola can be viewed as a huge media brand with amazing reach and frequency. If there are pitches out there from people who want to provide content and experiences, we are open to hearing from them. The question we ask ourselves is, ‘Can we use our assets as content, and can we create content out of our assets?’”

  Ultimately, the goal here is clear: We want to wrap back around into new ways to innovate and be inspired to create new customer experiences.

  Consider the case of a fictitious $25 million mid-market software company that’s managing a number of content-driven experiences:

  • A high-level awareness blog—designed to educate customers and convey the brand’s point-of-view.

  • A thought leadership program—made up of webinars, email nurturing, and a white paper program designed to teach customers best-in-class practices.

  • A customer engagement community—made up of customers and out-of-the-box third-party thought leaders who share how they’ve used the software in innovative ways.

  • An influencer program—encompassing physical events, eBooks, and beautifully designed snail mail pieces meant to communicate the “future” to the executives of the companies that use the software.

  For this software company, four major initiatives in the portfolio are being managed by the CCM group. Other “experiences” likely make up the promotion of these programs—such as a social media program that promotes both the blog and the thought leadership initiative. The sales enablement plan is likely linked to the thought leadership program and the customer engagement community, if not the influencer program as well.

  One cross-functional group (rather than many) is better equipped to examine how content can be leveraged across these platforms. Each platform will also have its own story maps, goals, costs, and success rates. All the platforms are related, and each can be duplicated to create scale across a larger organization.

  As one experience initiative grows, the CCM team must ensure that other initiatives can benefit from that growth. As one initiative begins to fail, the group must rebalance the investment in others, either to save it or so that the CCM team can mitigate the risk to the others.

  In very large organizations, there may be multiple CCM teams managing multiple portfolios. Some will be well advanced and some will be in their formative “team” assembly. Remember our earlier discussion about Carlos Abler from 3M? He manages a portfolio of CCoEs in varying degrees of maturity. As he told us:

  “I realized that organizational patterns link up in very interesting ways. One is in the Content Center of Excellence, which we are thankfully seeing more of now. I am also seeing and fostering what I internally refer to as a ‘Matrix of Excellence,’ or MoE. Various kinds of content initiatives may be managed cross-departmentally and cross-divisionally. This kind of aligned effort is still a type of organization, but not a ‘center’ in the usual sense because they are composed of people with different lines of reporting, geographies, P&Ls and so forth.

  “This is inevitable in organizations that have legacy organizational structures based on products or sub-brands and not markets or customers. Additionally, champions can emerge from many disparate role types, from subsidiary marketing director roles to marcoms, segment marketers, or corporate executives. That said, we are also spawning centers in the more traditional sense. My belief is that over time these MoEs will evolve into centers as the organization naturally matures into a more market- and customer-aligned organization, which strengthens and is strengthened by content marketing and agile marketing in general.”69

  Now that we’ve explored the process, we have to develop our audience. Let’s get to work.

  WHAT’S NEXT: THE 90-DAY VISION

  • The First Month

  Determine your next step. Do you have a content challenge, or an organizational challenge? You may have a great “pocket of success” that is worth expanding, or you may need to think about how you’re going to inspire belief. Put a plan together for how you can make a change.

  Recruit and assemble a team that can serve as the CCM leadership. Inspire participation first, before formalizing the group. Collaborate to understand how content might be applied at a more holistic level across these groups.

  Formalize this group with a charter and make the roles and responsibilities clear with management. Change job descriptions; make the business case for content as a function, not a project.

  Begin to create the first (or a modified) content mission for an existing or new platform.

  • The Second Month

  Lay-out and story map a number of experiences. Collaborate on how they will benefit each cross-function and assemble the plan for them.

  Prioritize and make decisions about which initiatives will make sense, given current budgets and priorities. Develop a plan for the rollout of these initiatives and how they will be measured.

  • The Third Month

  Start building out the story maps.

  Refine the structure of the CCM group. Finalize job descriptions, roles, responsibilities, collaboration on editorial calendars, etc.

  ENDNOTES

  61 http://techwhirl.com/aiim-study-82-percent-of-companies-lack-enterprise-content-management/

  62 Interview with Robert Rose, July 2014.

  63 http://www.slideshare.net/Altimeter/organizing-for-content-models-to-incorporate-content-strategy-and-content-marketing-in-the-enterprise-19795236

  64 Interview with Robert Rose, July 2014.

  65 Ibid.

  66 http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/10/content-marketing-mission-statement-2/

  67 Neis
ser, Drew. “What American Express’s OPEN can teach us about social media” Fast Company. July 12, 2010. http://www.fastcompany.com/1669407/what-american-expresss-open-can-teach-us-about-social-media

  68 Denning, Stephen. The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010.

  69 Interview with Robert Rose, July 2014.

  “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” | Orson Welles

  In our experience, there is no shortage of innovative ideas within companies. However, a huge wealth of ideas never gets a chance to be expressed.

  Leadership in companies often talks the talk of innovation, but rarely walks the walk. A great example of this comes from the world of PR agencies. We all know that for the last 10 years, the PR agency business has been under a fundamental disruption. One senior manager in one of the largest PR agencies in the world recently told us:

  “We often have all-hands meetings where senior management gives a very inspirational speech, about how we must be innovative and deliver new content marketing, and strategic social media solutions to our clients. And then, once the speech is over, we all go back to our cubes and try to get reporters on the phone to get coverage for our clients.”

  Companies want their marketers to be innovative—you know, as long as they can prove ROI on that innovative new thing they want to try.

  Innovation just isn’t built into the DNA of most larger companies these days. Most middle managers make senior manager by simply operating more efficiently than others in the organization. They sell incrementally more, they convert incrementally better, they hire incrementally better agencies, and achieve incrementally better financial results. This takes absolute discipline and focus, no doubt. But it does not lend itself to a culture of innovation.

  As Peter Drucker said back in 1985 in his classic article, “The Discipline of Innovation”:

  “Innovation is the specific function of entrepreneurship, whether in an existing business, a public service institution or a new venture…

  “Most innovations, especially the successful ones, result from a conscious, purposeful search for innovation opportunities, which are found only in a few situations.”

  Every innovative initiative starts with an idea and content-driven experiences are no exception. Whether they are driven by a member of the social media team looking to make a social channel more relevant, or by the demand-generation team seeking to make B2B sales processes more efficient, or maybe even the public relations team looking to create a more compelling corporate brand story—the idea is a seed that either gets germinated or squashed.

  As we discussed in Chapter 6, part of the role of the CCM group is to provide both a forum and an incubator for these ideas. But simply brainstorming, while fun and often very productive, often leads to a list of great ideas that end up abandoned for a host of reasons.

  Typically, innovative experience ideas are killed because of excuses such as “that’s not how we do things” or “that will never get sales support.” Other reasons include:

  • They seem too complex.

  • Buy-in was never obtained from the executive suite.

  • The ideas made it to the execution stage, but never met estimated measurement goals, so they were dropped a year later.

  • Truly innovative ideas are stuck in small sandboxes. Far too often, a completely transformative idea is trapped inside a single white paper because that’s how it was first conceived.

  To make the creation of content-driven experiences a scalable and manageable process, we need a structure for creating and mapping ideas—along with a way to estimate the value of those ideas among the projects being considered. Story mapping is a great way to create that structure.

  WHY CALL IT STORY MAPPING?

  The term story mapping is used in a number of past and current contexts. It is most predominant as a component of Agile software development, where it refers to the idea of grouping user “behaviors” (or stories) as a workflow to describe how software should behave. This is, in turn, a byproduct of the “Extreme Programming” movement in the late 1990s, which employed user stories (or use cases) as a way to develop products.

  Today, the practice of story mapping in software development enables architects to arrange the user “stories” into models that help them understand how the broader functionality of a larger software product should be developed. It helps establish a context for the developers to identify gaps or omissions in the development—and more effectively plan for larger releases or versions of the product.

  Additionally, story mapping is a term used by those in the creative narrative space. From screenwriters to playwrights to novelists, the term is used to describe how to effectively map (usually in some graphical template or outline form) the key elements of the story’s characters, setting, conflict, major plot points, and resolution development.

  In our approach to mapping content-driven experiences, we’re using the spirit of both the software and narrative contexts to create a high-level story structure. For us, the story map and the story mapping process enable a CCM-focused team to add a structural form to a larger creative idea about engaging a specific audience.

  As we’ve said before, CCM is an ongoing process. In order to sustain this managed process, as well as to scale it as a functional piece of the business, each initiative (just like every product development) needs a structure, a purpose, and (perhaps most of all) a way to measure the value created.

  In short, the marketing organization (or the CCM governing body within it) starts to operate not like a media company—but as a media company. It manages a portfolio of one- or multiple-owned experiential platforms that create value for audiences. The CCM story mapping process is a method to create the clear structure and to define the experiences that make up the portfolio.

  Parts of our story mapping process will be familiar territory to those who follow Agile methodologies, the work of Eric Ries and his Lean Startup approach, or the work of Rita Gunther McGrath and the Discovery Driven Growth idea. We also borrow heavily from some of the story development and structure best practices presented in Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. Vogler’s book is, in turn, a reinterpretation of the famous work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by mythologist Joseph Campbell.

  Of course, we’ve also adopted many successful and sticky “best practices” that we’ve observed while conducting research on brands and working with hundreds of large companies in our consulting engagements.

  THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF STORY MAPPING

  Story mapping has three distinct parts:

  1. THE WHY (we always start with WHY)—Our content mission. We begin with a content mission that provides the creative editorial heart, which helps to align the larger story of our brand with this specific initiative. Put simply: This is the value we will deliver to our audience. Additionally, we define who will receive this value—and why they will care. Finally, we determine how this experience will be different than what is generally available out in the marketplace of ideas.

  2. THE WHAT—Our business mission. This starts with our business goal, which answers the questions, “What does success look like? When should it be achieved?” We’ll discuss this further in Chapter 10, but this is where we differentiate the success of the initiative from its contribution to the business. We also define how the initiative will integrate into other parts of the business, and how it will serve cross-functionally.

  3. THE HOW—Our proposed map. The map illustrates how we will approach the initiative over time. Here, unlike outlining a campaign, we are planning for product development. In short, we are planning the first modules of a permanent space station, not a mission to orbit the Earth and come home.

  We then bring into this map our purpose-driven content strategy to determine how we will creatively tell our stories over time. We ask ourselves what kind of
content balance between the four archetypes we will need:

  • How much promoter content will we need to promote this new initiative—and over what time period?

  • How will preacher content fit? Will we use it to evangelize this new idea or infuse it into the platform, or both?

  • Will we need professor content (thought leadership or how-to content) at this point? Maybe not.

  • Will we need poet content to bond emotionally to our audience? Or, will this be purely educational?

  • Or, most importantly, how will each type of purpose-driven content play a role in the success of the initiative?

  Then, by taking the next three key ingredients in order, we can develop a clear proposal for an initiative so that our CCM Team can make a sound business decision on how to implement and manage it as a key piece of the portfolio of experiences.