Why Framing Alone Isn’t Enough

Welcome back to Exponential Growth, where I’ll share my insights and ideas on brand strategy, platform business, new technology, innovation, and staying relevant in a digital world. For more information, check out my website.

As we’ve learned from LEGO, framing is everything. They took a box of small plastic bricks, framed them as a skill-building tool focused on education, creativity, problem-solving, and collaboration, and became the world’s largest toy maker.

LEGO’s framing, as well as LEGO Ideas, has provided them with a sustainable position within the interaction field. However, not all companies have the ability to establish one singular frame and stick to it if they want to succeed.?

An interaction field company always frames itself within the context of the problem it seeks to solve.?

In Theodore Levitt’s famous 1960 Harvard Business Review Article, Marketing Myopia, he uses the railroads as an example of why some businesses fail to sustain themselves through poor framing. He says railroads did not go into decline because the need for transport had weakened. In fact, demand had grown, and the automobile business was skyrocketing. The railroads faltered because they had framed their business poorly.?

Levitt says, “They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than the transportation business.”

Even if railroads had framed themselves as providers of transportation, that would likely not have been enough to make them competitive with cars, which were framed as solving the problem of personal freedom and social mobility. Railroads thought of themselves as inside an unchanging box, and thus limited their thinking about what actions they should or could take.?

And speaking of transportation:

In New York City, the solution to the simple but unending need to travel locally from point A to point B used to be the yellow cab. But, over the years, the metered cab has come to be seen as a problem unto itself. Cabs manifest the sometimes unpleasant, unfriendly, arbitrary aspects of city life. And cab companies have not innovated since 1949, when the taxi meter was introduced.

Then Uber hit the market. Originally framed as a simple way to travel locally, Uber has framed and reframed itself as a mobility-services business, including peer-to-peer ride-sharing, ride-service hailing, and scooter and bicycle sharing. It then realized it could help make drivers more productive and enlarge their revenue stream by offering delivery services through Uber Eats for food delivery and UberRUSH for package delivery. Uber, without exactly saying so, reframed itself as an on-demand service company.?

Uber understood that it needed to solve problems for its participants. It was a way to conveniently move yourself from place to place, then a way to move other things you need around, all while solving for the societal problem of mindful resource management.?

The more the interaction field is framed from a social perspective, the more effective it is in generating gravitational pull.

Want to learn more?

Check out my book, The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society.

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