Sunday, March 18, 2012

TIME's: Ten Ideas That are Changing Your Life

Before I say anything, watch this.


I had one of those unforgettable learning moments about 2 years ago when Alex Bogusky talked about The Nine Gorillas. They were the major trends affecting our lives that were right in front of us, but we didn't truly see them or appreciate their impact. I learned from the Gorillas, and also the power of the obvious. Making sure we don't miss the movements of the tectonic plates as we focus on the pressure and rubble along the fault lines.

I hadn't seen such clearly articulated ideas until I read the March 12 issue of TIME magazine: 10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life. For those who didn't see it, I created a Cliff's Notes of excerpts and paraphrasing here. Thank you, TIME. Important, human insights for those trying to create relationships, serve, and design for people. There is also an optimism about them that I love.

1. Living Alone is the New Norm
The extraordinary rise of solitary living is the biggest social change that we've neglected to identify, let alone examine. In 1950, 4 million Americans lived alone and made up only 9% of US households. By 2011, nearly 33 million Americans live alone making up 28% of all US households.  The percentage of households increases as you look internationally to Sweden 47%, Japan 31%, and Britain 34%. According to sociologist Eric Klinenberg, living alone helps us pursue sacred modern values -- individual freedom, personal control and self-realization which are trumping economics. Solitary dwellers are primarily women, with the majority in the US being middle-aged adults from 35-64. In recent decades, young adults from 18 to 34 have been the fastest growing segment of the singleton populations. Fascinating, there is little evidence that the rise of living alone is making Americans more lonely. Living alone provides an opportunity to turn off and be better selves when we reconnect.

Monday, March 12, 2012

What Do Marketers Do? Part I

What do marketers do? The word marketer is thrown around a lot and sadly it seems in a more negative than positive way. I take so much pride in what I do: making meaningful things, relationships, experiences and stories for people. It seems weird that the word to describe that would have so much baggage. Hmmm.

The word market emerged around 1154 defined as a "meeting at a fixed time for buying and selling livestock and provisions." The word marketer then meant someone who "trades, deals, or buys at the market." Over the years, it evolved to "someone who promotes or exchanges goods for money" and unfortunately, at the turn of the 19th century, had associations with shilling and quackery (using false claims to promote something beyond its actual effectiveness). Marketing seems negatively perceived as a word that lives between the Mad Men basking in $50MM media buys and the analytical deceivers tricking and promoting their way into getting people to click more ads or buy more things.  It is as if marketers are described as conjurers trying to get as many people as possible to buy things they don't need or want. Yuck.

And today's marketers have certainly played a role in this declining reputation: using words like target, penetrate, segment and generate demand then referring to people as wallets, users and mass consumers. Look at marketers' job titles: Head of Most Valuable Customer Acquisition. VP of  Sales Optimization. Masters of Business Administration. Manager of High Potential Customers. Who's potential? The customer's or the company's?  I often say that marketers should always speak with respect and as if the customer were sitting right next to them. How you speak and humanize people often translates into how you act. Seems somewhere along the way we forgot that.

It feels like marketing itself needs a rebranding. I'm not tackling that here. But I do fear in the midst of the confusion and negative associations that the role of the marketer is getting lost. The best marketers are a vital voice for customers. They are authentic. They care. Marketing is a noble profession when it is at its best meaning: serving customers in a way that they value enough to pay for it and in return growing a company that creates jobs and the fascinating, useful, and meaningful products to keep that cycle going sustainably. As idealized as it sounds, in the markets of 1154, that trade nurtured the community and the people who were part of it. It feels like that should be possible today.

So here I am going to decode what a marketer actually does.

Monday, March 5, 2012

The Three Little Pigs Campaign for The Guardian UK

This campaign is so good I am speechless. The ingenuity, but more importantly the guiding cultural insight meshed with The Guardian's transformation. It is a great brief and the work is on brief. Jason Gonsalves from BBH Labs wrote an overview of The Whole Story campaign and the business strategy here. As a teaser, I pulled the video and one of the images below. But you'll appreciate it even more as a marketer if you see it all together on their site. Thank you to BBH, The Guardian and the storytellers.




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Addition March 9, 2012:
There are amazing parallels between the Three Little Pigs piece and the real life way KONY 2012 is playing out. From the connective spread of the message to the backlash and so forth. Fascinating and timely parallel. Here is the film and a Guardian article summarizing the controversy.