Marketing, Interrupted

by Dave Sutton

  • Leaders maintain a “proper” distance from the initiative to ensure that its needs are balanced against the demands of other projects.

  By contrast, you will know you are generating ACTIVE commitment if:

  • Resources on the program are people who are really important to the business.

  • The steering committee surfaces conflicts and manages risks.

  • There are communications on the importance of transforming market- ing for the business at every available opportunity.

  • Leaders are taking personal responsibility for managing any major conflicts raised.

  • Executives are publicly and passionately declaring sponsorship and sup- port for the transformational marketing program—and they are seen to take sides!

  Performance Management

  Scope for the program must be appropriate to obtain the business results desired; neither so broad nor so narrow as to jeopardize success. A performance evaluation process is in place to ensure that the program is appropriately staffed with high-quality, high performing talent who represent

  the cross-functional expertise needed for success. Rapid, agile implementation plan is in place and agreed to by all involved parties.

  You will know that scope, team and time are in balance if you are proactively managing the undercurrents of a transformational marketing program.

  • Expectations

  • Clear demands on project teams

  • Clear understanding of needed business results and timing

  • Scope aligned with desired results

  • Communication of purpose, timing and process of change

  • Clear boundaries for change are set

  • Clear link to personal/individual expectations

  • Energy

  • Balancing of work/play

  • Learning by doing

  • Celebrating key milestones

  • Nurturing involvement

  • Practicing “straight talk” and honesty

  • No “painfully polite” conversations

  • Rewarding and recognizing value creation clearly

  • Myths

  • Modeling of new/desired behaviors

  • Sharing of new success stories

  • No reminiscing on better times

  • Confronting sacred cows

  • Open discussions of what ought to be

  • Obsolete notions of marketing are rejected

  Generating Creative Tension for Transformational Marketing Success

  The stress of transformational change is accompanied by a sharp decline in perfor- mance at the individual and team level. We refer to this phenomenon of declining performance as the “Valley of Despair”, which is characterized by a steep fall in productivity, followed by a slow rise to previously established performance levels.

  As the organization emerges from the “Valley” and overall marketing pro- ductivity rapidly increases, a new form of stress and tension will occur. During this part of the journey, your people will begin speculating that there is another steep decline just over the next rise. The reality is that there is a gap between the promise of where you are headed and the reality of where you are. This results in additional organization tension, but in this case, it can also be a source of new energy for the team working on the transformational marketing initiative.

  “The gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there were no gap, there would be no need for any action to move towards the vision.”

  — Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

  Under the right circumstances, as pointed out by Peter Senge, this kind of tension can help facilitate creativity and increase your team’s ability to change. Generating this kind of creative tension requires clarity about your desired brand destination and full organizational alignment on the “truth about today.” In other words, the gap and desired outcome need to be clear so people are motivated to change. When properly directed and harnessed, a little organizational tension is not necessarily a bad thing.

  Creative tension is a behavioral adaptation that magnifies creativity and facilitates transformational change.

  When you clearly articulate your brand destination and the gap between your destination and your current reality, you create emotional and energetic tension that seeks to be resolved. Robert Fritz, the author best known for his work on “structural dynamics”, calls this a tension-resolution system. Fritz helps us visu- alize by using the metaphor of stretching a rubber band—as you stretch it, this creates tension, and the tendency of the rubber band is to pull back to resolve the tension in the system.

  Imagine that your destination is represented by your right hand and your cur- rent reality is represented by your left hand, with the rubber band around both hands. The greater the gap between your destination and your reality, the more the rubber band will stretch, the greater the tension, and the stronger the motiva- tion and energy will be to resolve that tension. And hopefully, the rubber band does not snap!

  Your team will be highly motivated to alleviate cognitive dissonance by clos- ing the gap between your current reality and your destination. This allows you to release more energy, resources, and creativity into finding ways to close that gap. It turns out that this can be a very productive and good form of stress or “eustress.” As marketers, when we are faced with an unresolved issue or a big

  challenge, this triggers us to perform at our peak and release more energy into dealing with the problem, and generating solutions for better results.

  Betty Edwards, in her book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, talks about how we usually tackle problems with our left-brain-directed thinking first. If the left-brain can’t solve the problem, it automatically shifts the problem over to the right-brain. When we have creative tension, the left-brain is more willing to shift the problem over for the right-brain. That’s when you start to find more creative solutions.

  Clearly, there are lots of different names for creative tension and lots of different models for generating it for good purpose. Creative tension is based on an understand- ing of how our minds control the management of our attention, energy, and creativity. It’s critical to use that understanding to build a structure that creates an energy that seeks to be resolved — what Robert Fritz calls the “path of least resistance” — and to flick the switch so that we can apply our best thinking to the issue. If you want to suc- cessfully leverage creative tension for your Transformational marketing team, focus on three things:

  1. Clearly articulate your brand destination in as much detail as you can. Don’t worry about using metrics and goals. Just ask yourself the question, “What does success look like?” It’s also important that you’re describing a destination, and not an anti-destination. A destination talks about what you want, while an anti-destination is focused on what you don’t want. Focusing on what you don’t want makes your mind associate back into current and past problems, so it serves to reinforce the problem, instead of generating the desired creative tension.

  2. Tell the truth about today. If you’re pretending that you’re somewhere you’re not, you’ll reduce the creative tension and run the risk of choosing irrelevant strategies to get to your desired destination. Watch, listen, and pay attention to the present. Ask for feedback and opinions from other people to get varying perspectives on your current reality. Question all your stories about reality so that you can peel away the self-deception and get to the core truth of what your current reality is all about.

  3. Build “how” bridges. Pay attention to defining the next obvious steps for bridging your current reality to your destination. You won’t necessarily know the full “how to get there” at the outset, but as you keep refining and articulating your perception of reality and your destination and keep taking the next obvious steps, you can trust that the creative tension will seek to resolve itself by getting you to where you want to be.

  Sometimes creative tension can feel pretty nast
y—especially if you’re not well practiced in using it. It feels a lot like mental anxiety and it’s easy to get wound up with so much stress that you can’t think clearly and it all just feels bad. One of the tricky things about creative tension is that there’s a sweet spot where the anxiety levels are “just right” to release your peak performance and best thinking. Too much stress and anxiety and you’ll drop into distress, and your performance and the quality of your thinking will plummet with it. So, don’t go pushing yourself to articulate a ridiculously huge destination in the hope that creative tension will get you there. Big, hairy audacious goals for your transformational marketing implementation are not always appropriate. It’s key to set up realistic goals!

  Here are some suggestions from Cath Duncan at Agile Living that we believe will help you prevent creative tension from becoming unproductive stress for your transformational marketing program team:

  By understanding and identifying the ways to generate creative tension, you now have a great opportunity to magnify organizational creativity and facilitate the transformational changes you need for a successful journey.

  Transformational marketing is about optimizing and mobilizing all marketing assets to create lasting preference for the brand, to activate customer purchase intent, and to accelerate organic growth of revenues and profits. To truly trans- form marketing and put powerful marketing systems in place to execute with ruthless consistency, you need to ensure that the conditions for success are in place before you start out on your journey. Periodically, you need to check in with the team; run the diagnostic; generate and focus creative tension; and assure that you don’t get lost along the way.

  Chapter 19

  Driving Innovation Through Marketing Systems

  ig box toy retailer, Toys “R” Us, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy pro- tection and is officially lost in transformation. The company pointed to a looming deadline to pay back $400 million of the $5 billion in long-term debt on their balance sheet for why they filed in advance of their all-important holiday season. The timing couldn’t be worse. The toy business is incredibly seasonal, more than 40% of the company’s sales come in during the fourth quarter of the year. Even though the company announced that it is not immediately closing any of its 1,600 stores, the bankruptcy filing signals instability to skittish toy suppliers and certainly puts shoppers “in play” to consider Wal-Mart, Target and Amazon

  for their holiday purchases.

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  “A lot of people hear the word bankruptcy and they immediately conclude that the brand or the company is going to go away’’

  — Dave Brandon, CEO Toys “R” Us

  Bankruptcy experts assert that Toys “R” Us is just running into the same head- winds that forced other big box retailers to file for Chapter 11: too much under- utilized real estate. While excessive debt and real estate overhang are contributing to the demise of the company, quite frankly, their real problem is far more severe. Here are the three key reasons why Toys “R” Us is going bankrupt and why their proposed turnaround actions may be futile:

  Their brand story has lost its relevance. Toys “R” Us is failing because the brand story is no longer relevant—not because people have stopped buying toys. According to the National Retail Federation, U.S. holiday sales grew 4 percent to

  $658.3 billion last year and they are forecast to grow 6 percent more this coming year. The fact is, people are still buying toys, they’re just not buying them at Toys “R” Us.

  “We all know retail is not dead or dying, but it’s certainly transforming.”

  — Matthew Shay, CEO, National Retail Foundation

  With more than 65 years in the toy business, the Toys”R”Us brand story has always centered on being the “toy authority” for parents and children alike. Do you remember Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, Furbies and Pokémon—the most sought-after holiday toys? The toys that your mom was willing to wrestle out of the hands of a complete stranger in the store?

  Let’s face it: Toys “R” Us was the place to get the hottest new toys and they had knowledgeable sales staff who would point you in the right direction during the holiday season. The brand story was about quality, value, selection and an in- store shopping experience focused on making the shopper the “hero.”

  Today, however, no one wants to be in a Toys “R” Us store during the holi- days—not even the desperate last-minute shoppers! Of course, shoppers still want to be the hero and score that hot new toy, but they don’t want to wait in long lines and risk getting into a fistfight with a distraught parent in the process.

  With detailed online reviews to inform purchase decisions and same day

  delivery service from Amazon, dad was a superhero last year when that Minecraft Lego Kit showed up at the front door the day before Christmas!

  Their strategy is still misaligned. Back in early 2014, Toys “R” Us announced its “TRU Transformation” strategy to address shopper experience challenges and position the company for growth. The broad strategy included inventory man- agement improvements, decluttering of stores, a clearer pricing strategy and sim- pler promotional offers for shoppers. The company also promised to integrate its in-store and online businesses more fully. And this is where they have failed.

  “Those endless aisles pale in comparison with what’s available online, and rock-bottom prices can be found at Amazon, Walmart, and Target.”

  — Greg Satell, DigitalTonto

  Most people today are “hybrid” shoppers—using both online and physical retail locations as part of their buying journey. For example, they may do their browsing and research online and then make a “targeted strike” to a bricks and mortar store to buy the toy they want. Although shoppers won’t ever ditch physi- cal stores entirely, they are shifting most of their holiday toy shopping online because cluttered stores and slow-moving checkout lines deter them. Moreover, Amazon has conditioned shoppers to expect instant gratification. To make that happen, e-retailers have shifted from having a few massive, centralized distribu- tion centers to many smaller, quick-response hubs close to large population cen- ters. Toys “R” Us is still stuck with these massive centers which makes it difficult for them to truly integrate their online and offline businesses and respond with the speed and nimbleness that shoppers demand.

  Their recent moves to upgrade systems are too little and too late. While Toys “R” Us has been minding the store, it admits that it fell behind on its e-com- merce systems. Now the company is making some big bets to try to close the gaps in their systems. Their revamp is part of a nearly $100 million investment over the last three years that is geared toward jump-starting an online experience that it acknowledges lagged some of its retail peers.

  “In a year to two years, we have to catch up on 10 years of innovation and that’s no small feat.’’

  — Lance Wills, Global Chief Technology Officer, Toys “R” Us

  They also recently announced that they will be offering a new augmented real- ity (AR) in-store experience for parents and their children. Geoffrey the Giraffe, the iconic Toys “R” Us mascot, will greet shoppers on their smartphone when they enter a store. Guided by flashing icons in the aisles, shoppers will point their mobile devices at toys on shelves activating a personalized experience on their screen. For instance, in the Barbie section of the store, a virtual version of a doll on the shelf comes to life, tells her story and engages with the young shopper. Will kids convince their parents to take them into their local Toy “R” Us so they can have fun and experience AR? Absolutely. And then, the parents will still go online to buy toys for the holidays. Quite frankly, AR seems more like a win for the manufacturer rather than the retailer in this case. Janie is still going to get her Barbie… but Amazon is going to get the sale!

  Frankly, it seems like the folks at Toys “R” Us are just trying to distract us with bright shiny objects. Systems have become their Story—rather than Systems enabling an authentic and relevant Story. That’s not innovation, it
’s just a ruse to get through another holiday season. Yes, AR has the potential to deliver a remark- able shopper experience in-store, but for Toys “R” Us, it’s like putting a band aid on a clogged artery and expecting it to heal.

  Rest peacefully Toys “R” Us and take comfort in knowing you’re not alone. You’re on a well-worn path that’s included many former retail category kill- ers like Blockbuster, Circuit City, Payless Shoe Source and Sports Authority. Turnarounds at this scale require a compelling Story where the shopper is the hero, a Strategy delivering a remarkable shopper experience and Systems executed with ruthless consistency. Chasing bright shiny objects like AR and attempting to lure customers back with interruptive online campaigns and in- store communications is not innovative.

  By contrast, consider the story of Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A introduced the famous “Eat Mor Chikin” tagline on a billboard in 1995. At the time, the company was facing stiff competition in a crowded market dominated by deep-pocketed, entrenched players like McDonald’s and Burger King. Leadership at the company knew that they would it would take something special to break through to cus- tomers. They landed on a crazy, yet totally inspired idea. If you want to sell more chicken who or what has a vested interest in getting people to eat more chicken? Well, cows of course! This simple and clear story helped Chick-fil-A become the top chicken chain in the United States, the country’s 8th-largest U.S. restaurant chain with more than $6 billion in annual sales.