Tag: trust

Numbers have stories

Fabrizio1 Comment

If the chances to contract a disease increase 10%, we would all be much more worried and depending on the disease even panic. Yet it would be more accurate to ask how much the disease is common in our population: if originally out of 100 people 1 catched the disease, the 10% increase would sound much less worrying than if 90 did.

If a company boasts a 100% increase in revenue in the past 3 years, we would feel confident in its good shape. Yet it would be better to ask how it got there year after year: if the revenue progression would be something like 100 – 150 – 250 – 200, than we might want to inquire what happened during the last year and our confidence would fade.

These are just a couple of examples of size instinct, the tendency to be impressed by a lonely number out of context.

Even though it requires more effort, we should always attempt to evalute things within their stories, to avoid being pulled back and forth by the latest trending number. This is true also when we try to tell about the latest marketing campaign, or the results of the latest customer satisfaction survey.

This is Marketing

Fabrizio4 Comments

What I wrote yesterday about the commoditization of marketing is deeply inspired by the work of Seth Godin.

This year, I have read his most recent book, This is Marketing, and despite having followed his blog for years now, and being familiar with most of his ideas, I felt it was the missing piece in my approach to marketing. A way to translate things that are already profoundly rooted in my practice into easy and plain words that everybody can understand.

You can’t be seen until you learn to see is the subtitle of the book, and that is a common thread througout the pages. The focus on empathy and on the necessity to deeply understand who you are serving is one of Seth’s mantras. There’s a metaphor he uses this time around, that is not only great at describing this approach, but also in differentiating it from the other side of marketing, the commoditized side.

It doesn’t make any sense to make a key and then run around looking for a lock to open. The only productive solution is to find a lock and then fashion a key.

Seth Godin

Marketing is about building a relationship, this should be nothing new to anyone who has read Kotler and his principles. And despite this being one of the oldest precepts of the field, we keep forgetting it, because other ways are more alluring and promise shorcuts to achieve results.

For Seth, it all starts by understanding what is the change you seek to make. Because every marketer is in the business of “making change happen” (and everyone who wants to make a change is a marketer). Then, understanding that changing everyone, seeking the mass, is not only unrealistic, it also sets us for mediocrity and disappointment. The only real possibility is identifying our “smallest viable audience“, the smallest market we (or our company) can survive on. And do our best work and responsibly bringing it to them.

This is Marketing is about a way to do marketing that considers affiliation more important than dominion.

Modern society, urban society, the society of the internet, the arts, and innovation are all built primarily on affiliation, not dominion. This type of status is not “I’m better.” It’s “I’m connected. I’m family.” And in an economy based on connection, not manufacturing, being a trusted member of the family is priceless.

Seth Godin

Affiliation, though, does not happen when you talk about how perfect your features are, or when you bombard people with flashy and catchy ads. It is a slow and long process, one that requires patience and consistency, and one that cannot be measured. And that’s where most marketers fail nowadays: they use the prime tool for affiliation (content marketing) and pretend to dress it for dominion (us, us, US!).

Eventually, if the marketer is successful, they will have served people that will spread the word (“the best reason someone talks about you is because they’re actually talking about themselves”, about their taste, about what is important to them) and that will speak up if they are missing (permission marketing).

This is Marketing is a beautiful read about mindset and change, one that is not for marketers only. Actually, it is for marketers only, but we all are marketers nowadays.

For a long time, during the days when marketing and advertising were the same thing, marketing was reserved for vice presidents with a budget. And now it’s for you.

Seth Godin

 

The commoditization of marketing

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Trust in digital advertising has never been so low. As a global industry, advertising is now considered to be the less trustworthy, coming after the likes of banking, energy, and telecoms.

This is nothing new.

Gary Vaynerchuk is right when he says that marketers ruin everything. His point is simple. It happened with TV, radio, mail, magazines, newspapers, internet, e-mail, and it is now happening with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat. When a marketer finds that the attention of the audience is somewhere, millions will follow, and soon (with TV, radio and magazines it took decades, but now it’s faster) people will veer somewhere else. The chase resets, and this process is never ending.

I would actually go as far as saying that it’s not only marketers. As human beings, we have the tendency to repeat what worked yesterday, to emulate success wherever we see it, to go down beaten paths.

Gary Vee says that this is inevitable, that there is no way out of this downward spiral. He might be right, yet I believe he would agree that there is a huge value in leading rather than following, in going after the niche rather than the mass, in finding your own unique way of doing things rather than copy-pasting what others have done infinite times.

Because after all, what really makes people shut down and move on to the next thing is the race to the bottom, designing for the lowest common architecture, dumbing things down to reach the maximum result with the minimal effort.

Art has never driven people away. And marketing, if done well, is art. It might not be for everybody, and that is perfectly fine.

Protect who you are

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Whether we are on the giving or on the receiving part of feedback, we need to make it very clear that there is a distinction between what we do and who we are.

This is liberating. Understanding that what the other person is saying is not a personal critique, as well as approaching the act of providing feedback with the intent of not imposing our worldview on the other, is what makes a relationship stronger and thriving.

So, when we ask for feedback, let’s be specific in what we are seeking. Can you tell me what you think of this thing I wrote? Do you think I should use this or that framework? What would you do to make it better? How do you think I could get better at presenting?

And let it be clear (to us) that what is at stake is not our character, our career, our relationships, our life, our future, our being. Only a minuscule part of that.

When we prepare to give feedback, on the other hand, let’s focus on things that happened and on how we interpreted that or how it made us feel. When that happened, I noticed everyone in the room went silent. This other framework is used more in such cases, because… . I really liked that part of your last e-mail, I find it showed great empathy and consideration. Your presentation featured very interesting information for the company, and with this and that you can make it memorable next time.

If we set a middle ground to have the conversation, without aggressing the other person’s space and building a resistance to our more vulnerable self with awareness and confidence, the magic of candor can truly happen.

Out of fear

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I was enjoying some of the early Spring (“early” for Finnish standards) with my daugther yesterday, as she was playing on the trampoline. She was jumping amazingly, doing flips I had never seen her doing before. She was gaining confidence, until she miscalculated and slightly hit her head on the rubber surface of the trampoline. Nothing too painful, yet it suddenly made me realize how dangerous what she was doing felt.

She tried to repeat the flips a couple of times, and I was way too scared to let that continue. I only had terrible images of terrible things happening to her in my mind. Eventually, I told her to stop, as it was too dangerous and she could get hurt. After that, she continued jumping more safely and certainly less enjoyably on the trampoline, and I could perceive she had lost part of the confidence that she had so bravely conquered.

The point is, when we are in a position of power, our words and behaviours have an immense impact on the people that look up to us. We can pretend that is not true, that it does not matter, that after all we are just sharing our opinion, and that we are no different from the people we lead. This is a trap I see many flat-organization hands-off managers and leaders do. And still words and behaviours are the major determinant of what we will get from our people.

I am not sharing this to give the impression that overanalyzing or beating ourselves up for our faults is a good option. If we do keep awareness on this power, there are plenty of ways we can correct our mistakes.

“I am sorry I asked you to stop, I was acting out of fear.”
“There is really no reason why you should not apply for that internal position, I am just panicking at the idea to lose such a valid team member.“
“Please, go ahead and do as you were suggesting yesterday. My initial reaction has not been one of the best, and it is because we have never tried that before and honestly I have no idea if that could work or not.“

If we do not maintain awareness, on the other hands, all we get is compliance and bottlenecks that have blossomed out of our own fears and self-doubts.