The Adaptive Marketer

So, recently, a much younger colleague at a client told me that I should listen to this really cool band that he’d just discovered.   He said to me, “I just heard this band called the Dead Kennedys – they released a ‘greatest hits’ album and I just downloaded it from iTunes.”

Oy, sometimes youth really is wasted on the young.

So, okay, first of all youngster get off my lawn.  Secondly – yes I know the Dead Kennedys.  They were one of my favorites as a young, suburban, latchkey na’er-do-well growing up in Dallas.  Their cassette (oh yes I just did) Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables would blare out of my pickup truck as I drove to piano lessons.  That’s right – punk rock, pickup trucks and piano lessons.  What can I say – as a teenager I was filled with contradictions.

And then, thirdly, are you kidding me?   The fact that the Dead Kennedys would even release a “Greatest Hits” at all is beyond ironic.  They were always the first to ridicule and parody the establishment.

I know this album well – and fans were generally annoyed with this album’s release in 2007.   The band had long broken up, and most knew it was just some of the band members trying to extract more money without actually releasing new material.  This critique was certainly not lost on the band – and hence the album title.

But okay, there’s something interesting here in all of this and it relates to our own marketing?

Even when we’re successful in marketing – why are we so resistant to change?   Why do we continue to milk our sacred cows?

After working with a number of companies over longer lengths of times, here’s what I’ve noticed:

The more successful our marketing is, the harder it is to realize when we have to change

We’ve watched it happen to entire industries.  The music business, newspapers and broadcast television come to mind.   And, we’ve watched it happen to individual companies such as Polaroid, Palm, and Sun Microsystems.

The people who managed marketing for these organizations weren’t dumb by any stretch.  They were smart, talented people (for the most part) and the lesson we need to learn is that it can certainly happen to us.    But why does it happen at all?

Our “Way” Gets In The Way

Over time, our marketing strategies and tactics become doctrines.  They are “the way it’s done”.  We come to have certain beliefs about things.  They become shortcuts for our thinking.  Consider some of these beliefs that I’ve heard from real clients (and even said myself):

• Events & Conferences don’t work for us – they never have
• We tried a blog once.  We couldn’t build an audience for it
• All of our best leads come from SEO
• We’ve maintained a 27% close rate on opportunities for two years
• Our real competition isn’t XYZ, it’s the ABC
• Everything goes through the VP of Marketing – that’s the way it is

And sometimes it’s not even something that the marketing team says out loud.  It’s just the “way that we do it.”

Even If It’s Not Broken – Sometimes We Have To Fix It

In today’s world, things change much too quickly not to be constantly open and seeking change in our marketing strategy.   With technology, globalization and the ease of communication, it’s just too easy for competition to emerge and suddenly become a disruptive force in our business.

As Adaptive Marketers, we’ve got to stop looking at our markets, competitors and customers through the lens of 20th century strategies.  We’ve got to deploy resources to be constantly looking for the opportunities for our marketing to change – even if it means disrupting what’s traditionally been successful for us.

Consider this:  iTunes launched in January, 2001 – while Napster and the whole idea of burning CD’s of music was under a cloud of Federal lawsuits.  The Napster service (as it was) shut down officially on July 11, 2001 – six months post iTunes launch.    On June 3rd of this year, the founders of Skype and Kazaa launched a Twitter-like streaming music service called Rdio.

Think the Apple marketing guys are paying attention?  Well, they may or may not be. But the rumors are flying about why they’re certainly taking their sweet time approving it for the app store.

Let’s Ask Ourselves Some Questions

As marketing leaders in our organizations, we can start to include continual, adaptive questions to facilitate this change and identify our doctrines:

What do we, as a marketing team, consider success?  If we look at our most successful tactic in comparison to our competition – where would we rate?

How much time do we spend extracting a decimal point’s worth of more effectiveness out of a single tactic vs. working on new, breakthrough innovations that may fail?

Do we hire people that look just like us (not physically) or are we considering people who see the world fundamentally differently than us?

What do we believe to be absolutely true about our marketing.  What if tomorrow we woke up and found out that it wasn’t true?  What would we do?

We need to make sure that when we’re looking at our markets, we acknowledge threats to our success before they become threatening.  This gives us the time to change in a way that is meaningful and not reactionary.

Take The Forgetful Pill

One of the keys to this success is freeing our minds from the doctrines that build up like barnacles on a ship.    There is often a mandate in corporate marketing to build up our knowledge base so that our doctrines can live beyond any one team member leaving.   But, okay, while we do that let’s also build in our ability to forget doctrines – especially the ones that we don’t even understand why they exist.

We’ve got to create an ability to give ourselves amnesia and fundamentally change our beliefs.  Just because something didn’t work – doesn’t mean it won’t ever work.   And, conversely, just because something has worked for a long time, doesn’t mean it will always work.   And sometimes those swings can come fast and furious.

So, what about you… What beliefs do you need to change?   I’d tell you mine – but I’ve suddenly forgotten them all…