Getting Radical, part 1

Few would argue these aren't radical times. Leaving aside the globally troubling emergence of strong men and violent nationalism, these are radical times for people in the business of getting and keeping other people. As customers.

What's truly radical is the shift of control in the marketplace for stuff. Just 10 years ago it would have been impossible to imagine the world we live in now. A world where almost 70% of us first-worlders enjoy instant, ubiquitous and persistent access to each other and everything from our networked devices. The network isn't everywhere. The network is us - always on, always open, its color-coded notification lights and numbers calling us to its table for both snack and feast. Billions of times a minute.

It's impossible to continue doing business and marketing as usual, as though this radical shift had not occurred. It's impossible to imagine surviving as a brand without utterly rethinking not only how we market - get and keep customers - but how we operate and inhabit the networked world as a business.

For the past several years, a loose posse of strategy renegades has been developing a new way of thinking about brands and their reason for being. About a brand's existential way of being in the emerged chaos of this networked world. I vainly count myself among this motley crew.

We're building and testing elastic frameworks to support a more radical type of brand and product marketing. A marketing where the time and distance gap between thinking and doing - planning and activation - has collapsed. A truly radical way of marketing, which becomes singularly focused on driving value, not media, into the consumer's need state. It's a radical rethinking of the entire marketing stack.

In fact, it's not a stack. It's a continuum, a truly always-on marketing, a marketing pod. A human experience generating machine singularly obsessed with delivering value into the world of our targeted humans. It represents a rather anarchic smashing up of the traditional marketing discipline silos, compressing our marketing from oldskool 3-8 week cycle times into 12-72 hour cycles. If it sounds as breathless as it is brave, you're getting the radical idea.

We'll be deep-diving into some of our other brave new marketing world tools in upcoming posts, but we're convinced their successful application are all dependent on a single moment of enterprise truth. The moment of startling boardroom truth, where the women and men around that table look into each other's eyes and agree to imagine a new kind of integrated strategy which will remake and remodel the enterprise itself, around this new marketing value machine. Utterly, fully. Radically.

We're suggesting nothing less than a business planning paradigm where marketing sits at the nodal center of a networked strategy-action model. A model where all other integrated planning elements - business strategy, brand strategy, product strategy and technology strategy - are genetically aligned with the marketing strategy. All focused through the digital keyhole through which our marketing expresses its value into the world of human experience.

Wags more clever than I have asked why the promotion of marketing strategy to the level of master among equals? The answer seems clear to me --- it is through the marketing interface where the customer is found. The thin, gossamer layer of our engineered user experiences where contact is made between the brand and the human. No other discipline across the enterprise enjoys such access to insights. To behavior. To delivering, and accessing, value.

How many businesses are thinking this radically about their structure, their culture, their philosophy? The answer is likely few. For now. But if you look at the cast of newer disruptive entrants to their categories, companies like Uber, Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, Medium, Tesla, Snapchat, Coursera etc. you will see this integrated enterprise strategy baked-into their founding DNA. For relative start-ups, this degree of structural innovation can be fashioned as the organic heart of the business. But, the loomingly existential question is this: can existing companies re-imagine and re-structure their inherent ways of thinking and doing around such a flat, fluid and integrated model of being in the world?

In future posts we'll riff on some of the emerging tools and frameworks insurgent new marketers have been developing and optimizing these last few years around this incessant focus on human experience value creation. Next up: applied listening, a methodology for mining, articulating and activating the fresh insights required for our radical marketing response to the brave new world of this, for now, teenage century.

Previously published in Big Evidence on 12/24/2016 https://bigevidence.blogspot.com/2016/12/getting-radical-part-1.html