by Robert Rose
CLASSIC LINEAR AND HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURES WILL BE INADEQUATE
Legacy systems that focus on campaigns and promotions have marketers geared toward seeing their work in a linear fashion through to completion, or toward abandoning it completely if things are headed in the wrong direction. McKinsey & Company points out that the areas outside of marketing are also locked into models that focus on products and services rather than aligning with changing customer dynamics.88
Earlier, we talked about the ability of marketers to organize for agility, not speed. When we talk about building liquid processes, what we mean is the ability for marketers to create processes that respond to the demands of a fast-changing digital world in which customers change even faster. Marketing leaders must establish processes that remove the barriers that impede business. Instead, they must enable agility across all departments in order to create the experiences that matter to target audiences in the most critical moments.
It’s hard to find familiarity and points of reference in a world that has no “normal.” In order to transform organizations, marketers must remain flexible and agile as they adopt new business strategies, work across departments, and lead diverse teams.
It’s easy for us to say “be more agile.” But, what does that actually look like? In a report by the Center for Creative Leadership, authors Adam Mitchinson and Robert Morris warn that the behaviors that are effective in one level of the organization don’t necessarily translate into other levels. They point out that agile leaders are better equipped to use new strategies and to lead change within their organizations. Here are the six leadership characteristics that Mitchinson and Morris say are most important for success:
1. The courage to challenge the status quo. Speaking up and openly questioning how things have always been done can prove daunting. By questioning long-held beliefs and working to break down silos between groups, content marketers will discover new and innovative ways to look at challenges and creatively solve them. The more diverse your experiences, the broader the perspectives you bring to your role and the more capable you will be of delving deeper to find new ways to meet your goals across the enterprise.
2. The ability to remain calm in the midst of adversity. Agile learners draw on past experiences to remain present and engaged when they face ambiguous and/or high-pressure situations. This allows them to tap into more insightful thinking processes—even at times when inspiration may be at its lowest.
3. Taking time for reflection. In the midst of all the demands placed on us and on our teams, agile leaders manage to take time to step back and reflect on the work we do, the meaning we create, and how that meaning affects our customers’ experiences. Having new experiences doesn’t guarantee that you’ll learn from them; however, reflecting upon them can offer deeper insights into how you will perform, how you will work with others, and how you will approach new challenges.
4. Purposely seeking challenging situations. Comfort and growth can’t coexist. Agile learners understand the need to push themselves and their abilities—and to explore situations where there is no proven process or outcome. Marketers who prioritize continuous learning will come to understand the ways that risk can lead to opportunity.
5. Being open to learning. Breaking down legacy thinking is the first step to opening your mind to new possibilities. Instead of relying on the crutch of “best” practices, think “next” practices. Don’t let the way you’ve always done things—even if it’s brought you success—circumvent the pathways to new ideas and experiences.
6. Avoiding defensive thinking. Openness is fundamental to increasing knowledge. But openness isn’t a one-way process; it requires talking about what you believe and why you believe it, as well as initiating honest, heart-to-heart conversations that may make you feel vulnerable. When you share your ideas, people will probably give you feedback, and some may disagree with your approach. But, agile learners resist the urge to become defensive. Instead, they listen carefully and seek to understand others’ points of view and perspectives. This is how they learn valuable lessons and insights that may come in handy for future challenges.89
BEWARE OF THE GLADIATOR EFFECT: IT’S NOT ALL OR NOTHING
Many organizations follow an all-or-nothing approach to new ideas. Teams research, put together plans, back them up with data, and present them to the person(s) in charge of that area…and wait for approval. “Approval” usually comes in the form of a thumbs up or thumbs down—just like the Roman people gave the gladiators. There’s no opportunity for on-going collaboration, development, or refinement. Either the idea lives or dies; the outcome is black or white.
Unfortunately, that approach doesn’t lend itself to evolving ideas or to taking the best parts and pieces from good ideas and making them great ideas. Instead, it sets teams up to look for approval from authorities who may or may not be the best judge of what creates a valuable customer experience. Many times, the managers making the live-or-die decisions have little to no contact with customers. So, they are out of touch with the changing dynamics of the marketplace.
This is why small, nimble startups sideswipe big companies with big budgets. The Goliaths are bogged down with groupthink and cannot appreciate collaborative decision making. Big budgets give people a false sense of security even though bigger doesn’t mean smarter or more innovative.
People like control because they think it helps them know what to expect. But you can’t control an uncontrollable environment. Whether or not companies are immediately successful with agile marketing, marketers need to get comfortable with a more fluid process. Teams think that projects fail because they are poorly managed; however, it’s more often the case that what’s needed has changed during the process—and they couldn’t recognize and embrace the change and adjust along the way. Failure ensues when managers focus on controlling events instead of guiding a process and empowering teams to use a framework that allows for change and then helping them clear the path to make those changes happen.
UNDERSTAND THAT INNOVATION IS A PROCESS, NOT AN INVENTION
Company culture confuses people about the real nature of innovation. Inventions are what you sell. But, innovation is about new ways to do business with your customers. In today’s world, innovation is more about new business models than new products (inventions).
The classic innovation example is Apple. They didn’t invent the phone, the music player, or online music downloads. But they developed a business model that put them all together and has exploded into a $170 billion enterprise.90
When Apple launched iTunes in 2003, they sold 1 million songs in the first week.91 The iTunes app store isn’t particularly sophisticated; the parts and pieces that make up the online store existed before Apple came along. Apple’s innovation contribution is how they put the pieces together to create a platform that distributes content to millions of customers. Apple created a radical new business model that found a better way to create value by improving the delivery of music that customers wanted.
Improving customer outcomes requires marketing to lead the transition toward more organic processes. Marketers are uniquely positioned to understand customer problems and how to improve outcomes. “What is the customer struggling with and what can I offer?” is a very different mindset from, “What can I build and sell?”
To transform business, we must build a culture of low politics and high transparency. We must think more like innovative entrepreneurs who embrace new thinking, customer involvement, early testing, and collaborative decision making. We must then make sure that our work delivers valuable customer experiences.
In his book The Lean Startup, author Eric Ries talks about how companies need to learn, iterate, and deliver outcomes in new ways. To do this, business (even marketing) functions require an approach to guide their work that is just as rigorous as that of engineers and product developers.
The lean approach means that marketers need to release themselves from their paralyzing fear of failure and
move into an entrepreneurial risk-acceptance mindset. Entrepreneurs and startups recognize that to vet new ideas that offer the best chance of success, you have to talk to customers in order to understand the subtle differences between what they need and what you sell.92
Ries indicates that startups must have a “true north” for what they want and where they’re headed so they can end up with the right product.
For marketers, when we think in terms of experiences rather than products, we must use the same entrepreneurial, lean startup approach to bringing change to our organizations. We’re not looking to instill another process that creates more meetings and bogs things down with more bureaucracy. Rather, we’re looking for just enough process to keep teams nimble as we scale our content operations. That doesn’t free us from bureaucracy, however. If anything, our roles are even more important because it’s our responsibility to break down barriers within the organization.
MAKE THE AUDIENCES AND ARCHETYPES YOUR OWN
One of Julie Fleischer’s innovations at Kraft (as part of her content-purpose strategy) was to segment her content by time and quality. She knew she’d have content that was ephemeral and low-production. She understood she’d have content that needed to be high-production value and evergreen. In segmenting this strategy—and in working hard to understand what her audiences wanted—Fleischer could assign each of these purposes to individual teams, from agencies to her own internal marketing group.
In the same way, as you come out of Chapters 4 and 5, you can create your own methodologies for identifying new audiences, develop your own archetypes, or layer on to the ones we’ve created. The archetypes we discuss in Chapter 5 are meant to provide a baseline of why creating content for a specific purpose changes with the purpose of the platform.
THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A RUT AND A GRAVE IS DEPTH
In Chapter 2, we discussed the need for marketers to take on roles as growth drivers, unifiers, and innovators. Your vision—your WHY—will serve as your north star and guide you and your teams toward a long-term common goal.
This also will be your most frustrating effort.
People love familiarity, even in uncomfortable circumstances. A known evil almost always trumps the unknown, even if the odds show that change can improve results dramatically by delivering:
• Better experiences for customers
• More opportunities for creativity in your work
• Greater collaboration in solving problems.
All companies struggle to infuse an understanding throughout their organization of strategy and how to execute on it. What varies is the level of difficulty of that struggle. Best-in-class companies do a much better job of communicating how every employee needs to learn, iterate, and evaluate as part of the larger organization doing the same. Marketers need to take the lead in infusing strategy across the enterprise, so that when course pivots need to be made, employees are more willing to change. This is where decisions get really difficult. Legacy thinking and the reluctance to change behavior leads us to treat strategies as if they’re cast in stone rather than being continually adjustable.
“Wait, I thought we had a strategy. Why are we changing it…again?!”
Every marketer detests hearing that phrase. There’s a difference between changing a strategy and evolving a strategy. The former means that it wasn’t the right strategy to start with. The latter means that you understand that as you execute, conditions change, and you need to pivot along the way to stay relevant.
In Chapter 7, when we talk about story mapping, it’s the journey part of the process where we continually ask:
• How are we doing compared with the outcomes we sought?
• What, if any, of our original assumptions do we need to change?
Teams can get stuck in groupthink, paralyzed by looking “wrong” because they adjusted (pivoted) mid-strategy. But those that do are more likely to embrace innovation and be able to create and iterate faster. The point to keep in mind is: always focus on the unique, content-driven experiences that you want to create for your audiences. The experiences that you create are the end results of your strategy. That’s what will keep your content fresh and enticing for your audiences and make them want to keep coming back. And it’s what will transition marketers out of the campaign mentality and into true content marketing.
AGILITY AND SCALE ARE NOT OXYMORONS
“Agility” and “enterprise” can indeed work together. As large companies consider how they can become more innovative and instill this mindset across the organization, they understand that size and scale can be their biggest hurdle unless they change the way they think.
Enterprises that welcome the opportunity for open collaboration realize that agility is a competitive advantage. And marketing is the logical driver of this change. As we covered in Chapter 2, marketing’s role needs to evolve and expand in order to guide our companies where they need to go. Marketers can best understand where industries are going and what customers want—and then translate that into practical action.
We marketers can examine strategies to understand where and when to pivot, and how those pivots work across multiple, interconnected teams. GE is a perfect example. When the company decided to implement the Lean Startup philosophy as part of its “simplification” push after the financial crisis a few years ago, it was marketers who often served as project managers. Dubbed FastWorks, GE’s version of lean wasn’t about corporate restructuring; it was about transforming how they did business in order to develop better outcomes for customers more quickly.
By giving teams more autonomy and encouraging them to bring in customers for feedback earlier in the process, FastWorks teams really did have the green light to fail, and fail faster, but on a smaller scale.93
The mindset of solving customer problems better and faster has gone so far as to lead GE to crowdsource answers to the world’s toughest problems with both internal and external input. They believe that by “sourcing and supporting innovative ideas, wherever they might come from, and applying GE’s scale and expertise, GE’s approach to open innovation is helping to address customer needs more efficiently and effectively.”94
GE’s Open Innovation Manifesto starts out by saying:
“We believe openness leads to inventiveness and usefulness…We also believe that it’s impossible for any organization to have all the best ideas, and we strive to collaborate with experts and entrepreneurs everywhere who share our passion to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues.”95
While GE has a significant leg up on its peers, it wasn’t quick work to get to this point. It was, however, a constant focus on innovation that got them here. According to Linda Boff, executive director, global brand marketing:
“We’ve been around for 122 years and we’re about invention, reinvention, and introducing new products—some of which have become their own industries. We see ourselves as being in perpetual motion. For example, we talk about how there are fireworks and campfires. You never let your campfire go out. At GE, those are constant research and development, innovation, leadership, globalization, simplification, and operating in a lean, fast manner. That’s our foundation. The fireworks are bigger things that will pop out, and they will change because the market changes.”96
Boff pointed out that 10 years ago, one of GE’s fireworks was Ecomagination, the company’s commitment to technology solutions that save money and reduce environmental impact:
“It started as a firework, and now it’s how we do business. It’s a campfire now.”97
LIQUID LEARNING TRANSFORMS INTO LIQUID PROCESSES
As new types of team structures develop a history of working together and delivering success, marketers can show how our work will truly transform the business. And that ultimately demonstrates the value of the work we do as marketers.
To achieve this result, we must relentlessly pursue customer value by always thinking about the customer experience we’re creating. Be an advocate for cus
tomers at all times and share these thoughts with others within the organization. While the push for change and innovation must be constant, that doesn’t mean that change comes overnight. Boff pointed out that GE has had the same relentless focus for the last decade:
“The big themes that [CEO] Jeff [Immelt] talks about today are the same from 10 years ago—globalization, leadership, invention, and so forth. We believe that what we do is about making the world a better place. But the transformation that has come about in the GE portfolio since 2005 has given us a cohesive story.
“We’re all living in a world where the totality of how you experience the brand is important. It’s about how you show up. The world is so transparent and people are able to talk about their experiences first hand.” 98
Putting yourself in a challenging environment is one thing, but being able to cope with the pressure of that challenge is another. It’s important to be able to handle the stress that comes with the unfamiliar situations that creating and implementing new frameworks within your organization will create. It’s unrealistic to take all that we’ve covered in this book and expect it to be implemented in a matter of months. Change within organizations doesn’t happen that quickly.