How to Stop and Think about the Future of Marketing in a Connection & Blockchain World

TL:DR; Marketing is accelerating ever faster towards connection as the key lever. Mass distribution continues to fade. Understanding the implications of the shift is critical. A new PDF, Stop and Think: A note to marketing leadership about the digital revolution, explains this brilliantly. Highly recommend you read it.

The easiest thing to think about when a new technology comes on the scene is “how do we use this new thing for our benefit?”

The most difficult thing to see is “how will this new technology affect the way we do things in the future?”

The MOST important part is to ask yourself the 2nd question, not the first.

We saw this with the Internet and we saw it with social media.

We are going to see it again with crypto.

But you can get an idea.

That is why I am advocating that you “Stop and Think.”

Stop and Think: A note to marketing leadership about the digital revolution is the a new PDF put out by one of deepest thinkers in the entire world of marketing, Richard Stacy.

I envy Richard for the way he breaks down the difference between the “old world” of marketing vs. the “new world.”

The old world was about distribution. The new world is about connection. The platforms of today are connection platforms. TV, Radio, and newspapers were distribution platforms.

In short, you are “not going to be successful in a connection game if you come at it with distribution-based tactics.”

Richard lives in the world of big brands, serving them as a consultant, so he sees what happens up close and personal and is a very keen and astute observer of the fact that most people don’t recognize revolutions.

“A revolution is a time when the new things don’t look like the old things they are replacing…New things can usually be tackled with a tactical response or strategic readjustment, but new rules require a strategic rethink.”

Richard’s case is that we are in an era of new rules. I believe he is right.

One of the key implications and, frankly, one that I need to emphasize even more than I already do is based on this gem:

In the old world, “it was always more costly to distribute information than it was to create it . This is why the media (distribution) budget was always bigger than the (content) budget.”

So, the logical conclusion is that you should spend a far greater percentage of your marketing budget on creating content. A LOT more. Follow the Dandelion Marketingapproach and make a lot of “little bets.” But, a critical thing to keep in mind is that it is not just MORE content, it is more content that is a credible answer to a known consumer/customer question. This means investing more time in the process of socializing content than actually producing it.

A content strategy, in the new world, should really be seen as an information management strategy that is all about ensuring that your customers have real time access to the questions for which your brand is an answer. And this process starts with understanding what those questions are. Content on its own doesn’t work unless it is embedded within a much broader process of consumer understanding and response – that is what the money needs to be spent on. The problem is people just reach instinctively for the content gun and start spraying the bullets around.

I see marketers making this mistake ALL the time. They buy distribution. It’s “pay for play” but they are jamming mediocre content or “non-newsworthy news” down channels that they don’t own. They are renting.

There’s plenty of evidence, (thank you Facebook) that it is better to have an audience whose attention you have earned. [It is why I tell people that this blog is the single most important brand asset that Never Stop Marketing has…by far.]

The new marketing, as Richard writes, “requires that brands start to create audiences for themselves, rather than rely on media channels to deliver one for them.”

Buying audiences is lazy. Earning it is hard work. Would you rather be the landlord or the tenant?

In the end, Richard tells us that the new marketing is about “listening and response,” one that prioritizes behavior recognition vs. passive location/channel.

Richard doesn’t pull any punches and for many people, it’s going to be uncomfortable reading because it challenges convention. It’s going to be very difficult for others to implement, because it goes against the grain of what has been taught and passed down as “wisdom” over the past century and will thus run into a lot of resistance.

Yet, it doesn’t change what is happening on the street.

His opening metaphor is very powerful and I think it is apt.

If you were a man of substance in Paris in 1789 you would have looked out of the window and seen lots of new stuff: riots, executions, storming of prisons and the destruction of the old order.

Your tactical response to this might have been to stockpile food, bury your money, stitch a tricoleur onto your hat and put a better lock on the door.

However, to prosper in the long-term it wouldn’t be sufficient to simply respond to what was going one, you needed to know why it was happening, why the old order broke down, what type of order is going to replace it and how you can continue to prosper within it.

How you can continue to prosper within it…that’s the strategic challenge.

Now, let’s take this to the blockchain level (which Richard mentions briefly).

In a blockchain world, I expect that many of the characteristics that Richard describes are going to be accelerated beyond what he described.

• Connection will be even more important.
• As we have discussed here and here, tribes will form around common values. Because of the possibility of forking, projects that don’t have these connective tissue elements will suffer.
• Monitoring and responding to consumer behavior is a competitive differentiator.
• This will be particularly true when you don’t have personal information about your users. All you have is information about who is HODLing and who isn’t. In the Decentralized Marketing Organization book, we called this the HODL Index.You’ll need tools like Endor (discl: advisor) to help you predict which wallet is likely to leave and then engage directly with them.

As Richard says, “If you are going to target anything in the digital space, you should target behaviours not people.” In a crypto world, you won’t even be able to target people, so you’ll have to target behaviors.

Following his logic, the crypto-native marketing tools that are going to be essential are “Crypto Listening” and “Crypto Behavioral Analytics.” Probably a multi-billion dollar business in the making and one that is going to be captured by the folks who understand the revolution.

There are many revolutions happening in industries, politics, and governance systems around the world. What Richard does, for all of the marketers out there, is help us all put into context what each of us has experienced over the past 10-15 as digital and social became mainstream.

Though there are a few sentences that require some extra mental effort, the overall PDF is well worth the read for anyone who wants to be a successful marketer in the unfolding, increasingly digital, social, and (soon enough) crypto world.

By the way, you can see how much I marked it up here. Blue is for blog post idea. Yellow is just for something I want to leverage on my own. As a comparison, an average article I read will have 3-5 post-it notes. Enjoy