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.

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.

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.

Learning Marketing on the Job

If you are trying to learn marking on the job, here is a Pinterest Board I created of really good videos, slideshares, books, plus more. They help marketers mobilize people inside and outside of companies. They can help you understand the role of a marketer and how that is changing. It has classics, plus actionable information on the forefront of marketing. They are inspiring, practical and personal--not academic. Here is the link.


For your convenience, I categorized them with brief descriptions so you can self-serve a la carte. It is current as of today. The Brand Binge posts are at the top. This was so much fun to do. I love that marketers have such generous spirits to share and learn. Me too.

John Willshire: Love and Lifestrapping

John Willshire is wise. He reminds why I love what I do and why I am so optimistic and hopeful about marketing and branding. He talks about the people in a brand's community as Blacksmiths, not salesmen. He has a beautiful way of saying this on Smithery.co:

I woke up this morning to his great post: Love and Lifestrapping - Entrepreneurial Inspiration From #firestarters. It is a quick reflection on loving what you do. It also touches on themes I have written about like minimal viable marketing in a soulful way. Enjoy it. I did. 

Thanks, @willsh.

Barbara Apple Sullivan is One of My Marketing Heroes

A draft of this post has been sitting in the queue since I started this blog. I wanted to save it until I had some readers. And today is definitely the day. I couldn't be more excited to share.

Barbara Apple Sullivan is one of my marketing heroes. She founded her own agency Sullivan in 1990. She was an early Mad Woman let alone a woman-owned business on Madison Avenue. Amazing.

Barbara specializes in business-to-business branding. She helped teach me how to create simple, meaningful messaging and product architectures. I often use messaging platforms that we created together as "templates" to each other marketers. Over the past 20 years, she has gathered and mentored a posse of men and women who believe creativity, inspiration and business can go together, like Nicole Ferry and Diana Bach. Nicole has a fantastic quote on their site:

Minimum Viable Marketing

This question showed up on Quora: What does start up branding mean for an early stage company? Is it just picking a name and a logo? I have been asked this question from start ups before. There are also some similarities when an established company is piloting a new product. I wrote a short answer on Quora and then got more questions. So I answered them all in the spirit that it might help engineers and founders bring their amazing ideas to the world. I hope so.

The Brand:

Branding isn't just a logo. A logo or an ad may capture the meaning of a brand, but it can't create it.

A brand's meaning is created by every touch point a person has with a brand. So we have to make sure the people who are responsible for delivering those experiences -- employees -- understand our brand values. They have to believe. We have to believe.

I have found that start ups and their founders have audacious dreams to change the world that can make a great brand ideal.

Google started out to "democratize the world's information." Square wants to "change the way people do business." Kiva wants to "connect people through lending to alleviate poverty." Method wants to "make products that work, for you and for the planet." Pinterest is trying to "connect everyone in the world with the 'things' they find most interesting."

People don't pull all nighters at Square to process payments. They could do that at Paymentech. Square employees want to change the world. They are inspired by a leader who is trying to. You can feel it in everything they do: their design, pricing policy, tweets, plus more. The logo and name are a white square -- very generic -- which makes this point even more powerfully.