We're in a Liminal Zone. What's your Plan?

Like every other advertising and marketing professional with "Innovation" in their title, I have an off-the-shelf presentation ready to go for any client who needs to get up to speed quickly on all things Future.

There are the requisite slides - often adjusted based on current market conditions - addressing what I refer to as the "alphabet soup of transformational technologies," including but not limited to A.I., ML, AR, VR, IoT, Voice UX/UI, 5G, and Self-Diving vehicles, etc. Lots of shiny objects, product demos, and predictions on how quickly any of them will achieve enough scale (and relevance and meaning) to warrant a marketing investment.

I've been giving similar "trends" presentations for a while now, and over the years I've woven concepts from academia, literature, B-school case studies... any interesting reference points I can find to formulate a compelling, relatable narrative. As exciting as Innovation and new approaches can seem, the idea of change is generally difficult and painful. Keeping it innocuous has been key to keeping an audience engaged.

That worked up until recently. Things are different now.

I've shifted my narrative to focus on something that I think is missing from much of the dialogue about transformational marketing and advertising: a sense of dramatic urgency.

To emphasize my point, I've been referencing the anthropological concept of Liminality:

Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold" between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes.

Sound familiar? We are all standing at this proverbial threshold: a Liminal Zone, full of ambiguity and disorientation (and opportunity, if we choose to partake in the new "rituals").

To exist in the Liminal Zone is not a choice. It is a function of progress and history driven by - in this case - a set of new technologies that will catapult us into a new era. We're all participants.

What is this new era? It's been referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or the 3rd Connected Era. It is a special moment of time in-between Innovation S-Curves where "digital" is to be regarded as oxygen and not a channel. It is the consumer behavioral, socioeconomic, and political transformation that we have seen in the last decade fueled by mobile device proliferation, but by a factor of 10 (or 100, or 1000). It's what comes after 90% of smartphones have native AR capability, after Level 4 autonomy subverts the trucking industry, after 50 million of us have purchased Amazon Echo or Google Home devices for our living rooms. It's teenagers deciding to keep in touch via chat platforms instead of IRL. It's staying at an Airbnb instead of a hotel. It's eschewing the concept of vehicle ownership in favor of ride sharing.

It is the struggle of maintaining healthy business today while making necessary investments in the future.

It's not going to hit us all of the sudden; it's already happening to us.

It is wondering in the midst of all of this, how we can best deliver a marketing message to a relevant consumer.

I suppose this could be read as a very dramatic way to suggest that a % of overall marketing budget should be dedicated to "Innovation." But it's so much more than that. To survive and prosper this middle-stage requires embracing organizational transformation - quickly - to establish the "rituals" and habits, and obtain the knowledge and learn the skills needed to prosper in the new era. This is obviously not easy, and not without pain.

Every one of us has a choice to acknowledge our current Liminal Zone and formulate an action plan. It isn't so much of a choice as it is the threat of being left behind.

So, what's your plan?