17,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Media has most definitely evolved, as have the ways in which we contemplate, design, communicate and execute strategy. And rather than technological evolution, we’re plainly in the midst of a technological revolution.
We have no choice then but to reframe marketing and PR in the context of 21st Century technology, 21st Century media and disintermediation, and 21st Century articulation of and appreciation for business strategy.
“Today, every organization is in the influence business. We influence customers to buy from us, employees to work for us, and the media to write about us. Gone are the days when you could be your own island. Now, to be successful, you need to live within the influence ecosystem and that requires a change of mindset. Fortunately, Philip Sheldrake will show you how.”
David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and the new hit Real-Time Marketing & PR
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 320
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
Ähnliche
Contents
COVER
SERIES
DEDICATION
TITLE
COPYRIGHT
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
The questions this book seeks to answer
The business context
Influenceprofessional.com
1: WHERE WE ARE TODAY
The Cluetrain and Permission Marketing
Marketing and public relations
Integrated marketing communications
Summary
2: THE SIX INFLUENCE FLOWS
A clean sheet
Some definitions
Mapping the interactions
Mapping the influence flows
Contrasting the six influence flows with the traditional emphases
The 2nd flow and the Internet
A new stakeholder
Summary
3: INFLUENCE
Summary
4: THE SOCIAL WEB
Social Web analytics
Summary
5: MEASUREMENT, COMPLEXITY AND INFLUENCE-CENTRICITY
Measurement
Influencer-centric
Influence-centric
Summary
6: THE BALANCED SCORECARD
An overview
Strategy maps
Summary
7: THE INFLUENCE SCORECARD
The Balanced Scorecard and the Influence Scorecard
Taking a lead
Influence objectives
Influence strategy
Mapping the influence strategy
The Influence Scorecard and OSM
Constructing the Influence Scorecard
Budgeting
ROI
In the face of chaos
Influence capability maturity model
Another scorecard
The Influence Scorecard and integrated marketing communications
Summary
8: INFLUENCE TRENDS
Mobile and other things
Privacy, data ownership and sharing
Buyer marketing
Knowing what it all means
Summary
9: REFRAMING MARKETING AND PR
Influence performance management
10: THE CHIEF INFLUENCE OFFICER AND INFLUENCE PROFESSIONAL
The Chief Influence Officer
The influence professional
Organization structure – the office of influence performance management
External agency and partners
Summary
11: WHAT NOW?
Prerequisites
Pre-board-approval actions
Post-board-approval actions
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
ENDNOTES
INDEX
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
3: INFLUENCE
Table 3.1: Example shorter- and longer-term manifestations of influence
5: MEASUREMENT, COMPLEXITY AND INFLUENCE-CENTRICITY
Table 5.1: Maturity of influence approach
Table 5.2: The role of influencers in the marketing funnel, Razorfish, Fluent report, 2009, reproduced with permission
Table 5.3: The influence traceability quadrants
Table 5.4: Comparing market research and continuous engagement
6: THE BALANCED SCORECARD
Table 6.1: Stakeholder representation in the Balanced Scorecard perspectives
Table 6.2: Learning and growth strategies for customer management. (Strategy Maps, © Harvard Business School Publishing 2004, reproduced with permission)
Table 6.3: Example management processes listed in Strategy Maps for the four internal perspectives
8: INFLUENCE TRENDS
Table 8.1: Example statistical rules for information loss
List of Illustrations
2: THE SIX INFLUENCE FLOWS
Figure 2.1: The Six Influence Flows
5: MEASUREMENT, COMPLEXITY AND INFLUENCE-CENTRICITY
Figure 5.1: Traditional market research
Figure 5.2: Continuous engagement
6: THE BALANCED SCORECARD
Figure 6.1: The ‘stack’ (Strategy Maps © Harvard Business School Publishing 2004, reproduced with permission)
Figure 6.2: A strategy map represents how the organization creates value. (Strategy Maps © Harvard Business School Publishing 2004, reproduced with permission)
7: THE INFLUENCE SCORECARD
Figure 7.1: Objectives and strategy
8: INFLUENCE TRENDS
Figure 8.1: Potential privacy framework
Figure 8.2: An example privacy dial
Figure 8.3: The LinkedOpenData Project interlinked datasets, September 2010
Figure 8.4: Example of a Google rich snippet
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
cover
Content
i
ii
iv
v
vi
xi
xii
xiii
xv
xvi
xvii
xviii
xix
xx
xxi
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
181
182
183
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
Further praise forThe Business of Influence
“The Business of Influence is a whack on the side of the head for traditional marketers. By focusing on influence, instead of traditional marketing think, it reframes and redefines everything that a modern marketer does. The Business of Influence should be found, dog-eared and jam-packed with marks in the margins on every successful CMO’s desk.”
Katie Delahaye Paine, Founder and CEO, KD Paine & Partners, author Measure What Matters
“Philip Sheldrake shares an important vision of the new communications world order. PR and advertising professionals need to sit up and take note. Influence is the future watchword – and the smart companies are already exploring it and switching models.”
Robert Phillips, President & CEO EMEA, Edelman
“Today, every organization is in the influence business. We influence customers to buy from us, employees to work for us, and the media to write about us. Gone are the days when you could be your own island. Now, to be successful, you need to live within the influence ecosystem and that requires a change of mindset. Fortunately, Philip Sheldrake will show you how.”
David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and the new hit Real-Time Marketing & PR
“Philip Sheldrake helps us rethink the business of influence. It goes without saying that the social web has transformed the world. Business strategies need to keep pace. Readers should embrace this book and let it challenge their beliefs about the future of marketing and business.”
David Alston, CMO, Radian6
“Philip Sheldrake was a feisty, thoughtful and passionate audience participant during the AMEC session defining the Barcelona Principles in 2010. His belief that communications needs to change continues in this book, which gives conventional thinking a healthy stir. This is a book I hope major corporations will put on the recommended reading list for their senior management.”
Barry Leggetter, Executive Director, the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC)
“The Business of Influence is an excellent guide to understanding how to develop and drive a management agenda through marketing and communications in the increasingly complex age of social media and digital technology. It is a handy and useful guidebook for every practitioner from the newly minted account leader in an agency to the seasoned professional or academic in this field.”
David B. Rockland, PhD; Partner, Ketchum Communications; CEO, Ketchum Pleon Change and Ketchum Global Research; Chair, AMEC US Agency Research Leaders Group
“Philip has touched a nerve with The Business of Influence. It’s a highly detailed, authoritative examination on the business of influence, a book of the now. Many unkind observers of the current state of PR suggest it has entered a new age of snake oil sales folk. Sheldrake’s book proves that there is a higher level of thought. It structures a practical study of material which I am sure will prove to be invaluable insight.”
Mark Borkowski, Founder and MD, Borkowski
“The Business of Influence is an essential read for communications professionals seeking to keep pace with the new realities of social business. Philip Sheldrake powerfully deconstructs old business paradigms about business marketing and communications in order to align it with the realities of social business so we, as an industry, can rebuild with greater success. It can help the influence professional directly impact the bottom line in this new social media driven world.”
Vanessa DiMauro, CEO Leader Networks
“Philip Sheldrake stalks the world of PR in which digital mediation is taken as a given. The nature of a web of communication is complicated and with Philip’s help, we are beginning to understand how information flows through it.”
David Phillips, FIPR, FSNCR, co-author of Online Public Relations: A Practical Guide to Developing an Online Strategy in the World of Social Media
“Philip Sheldrake gets it. Public Relations and Marketing have always been about influence and his Six Influence Flows and the Influence Scorecard are a real step forward in making sense and evaluating these activities in the digital age.”
Professor Anne Gregory PhD, Director, Centre for Public Relations Studies, Leeds Business School; author Public Relations in Practice
“Yesterday’s approaches to influence do not work in today’s world. In The Business of Influence, Philip Sheldrake nails the fundamental problem in the 21st Century – our methods are rooted in the 20th Century.”
Marshall Sponder, The Web Analytics Guru, author Social Media Analytics
To my wife Jay – the primary influence
in sparking my interest in the business of influence.
THE BUSINESS OF INFLUENCE
REFRAMING MARKETING AND PR FOR THE DIGITAL AGE
PHILIP SHELDRAKE
This edition first published 2011
© 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Registered office
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom
For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com.
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sheldrake, Philip, 1971-
The business of influence : reframing marketing and PR for the Digital Age / Philip Sheldrake.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-97862-7
1. Internet marketing. 2. Marketing. 3. Public relations. 4. Influence (Psychology) I. Title.
HF5415.1265.S53 2011
658.8′72—dc22
2011007714
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-470-97862-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-119-97337-9 (ebk)
ISBN 978-1-119-97830-5 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-119-97831-2 (ebk)
FOREWORD
This book will make practitioners in marketing, PR, advertising, communications, and any professional with the word digital in his title uncertain about the future of his discipline. Philip Sheldrake makes the case that the traditional boundaries of these professions must morph into a more holistic expertise, which he calls the influence professional. And while such professionals must retain their creative right-brain talents, they must become far more skilled in left-brained analytical competencies.
The convergence of markets, media, and technology raises the bar further. New business models, the proliferation of social media, the relative power shift from producers to consumers, and the overwhelming amount of structured and unstructured data make managing our businesses more challenging than ever. It seems that we increasingly know more and more about less and less. Change is constant, and accelerating.
What to do? The author proposes a creative, structured approach to the business of influence, which is to say, business itself. He identifies the interactions between stakeholders – businesses, employees, customers, competitors – and maps the primary influence flows among them. He provides a practical framework for seeing, and acting on, the drivers of value creation. He proposes an Influence Scorecard that integrates strategy, objectives, and processes in an actionable influence framework. The scorecard provides structure, focus, and a common language – across organizational boundaries – that drives desired behaviors and outcomes. It puts influence at the center of the strategy.
Strategy is how an organization intends to create value for its stakeholders consistent with its mission. Strategy is a process, and like any process, it must be managed and its efficacy measured. And while strategy is important, it’s the execution that counts. In a world where 7 out of 10 organizations fail to execute their strategies, it is not surprising that execution – that is, fulfilling the promise of creating value for stakeholders – is the number one issue that keeps executives up at night. The Kaplan Norton Balanced Scorecard has become the dominant framework successful organizations use to execute their strategies.
The author’s Influence Scorecard builds on the Kaplan Norton approach, in which success is based on universal management principles: aligning around the critical few things that matter, identifying cause-and-effect relationships that result in desired outcomes, setting measures and targets to drive behaviors, choosing initiatives that close performance gaps, and managing strategy as a process. The Influence Scorecard shares these principles with the Balanced Scorecard, and applies them to the emergent, cross-disciplinary domain of influence.
Readers will find helpful the author’s syntheses of recent research and writing in the art and science of influence – including insights into social media and Web 3.0 developments, chapter summaries, and a glossary. Whether the emerging profession of the Chief Influence Officer leads the nexus of influence as the author suggests, or another C level executive, influence – like strategy itself – is a team sport. Influence is everyone’s responsibility. This book will help you understand your contribution to that reality.
Robert L. Howie, Jr.
Managing Director, CMO, Palladium Group, Inc.
Director, Kaplan Norton Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for Executing Strategy
Boston, Massachusetts
February 2011
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Jay O’Connor, Robert Howie, Doc Searls, Katie Delahaye Paine, David Meerman Scott, Barry Leggetter, Jay Krall, Stephen Waddington, Robert Phillips, Gabbi Cahane, David Phillips, Giles Palmer, Andrew Bruce Smith, Julio Romo, Ted Shelton, Blaise Hammond, Steve Earl, Scott Monty, Brian Solis, John Woodget, Andrew Betts, Claire Plimmer, Richard Wood.
INTRODUCTION
Are you in the business of influence?
You have been influenced when you think in a way you wouldn’t otherwise have thought, or when you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.
So, are you influencing? And are you being influenced?
If you’re in the business of marketing, advertising, public relations, internal communications, public affairs, customer service, customer relationship management, social media, copywriting and content, SEO, branding, branded apps and widgets, brand journalism, Web design, graphic design, direct marketing, packaging, merchandising, promotion, publicity, events, sponsorship, sales and sales promotion, marketing and market research, product and service design and development, then you’re in the business of influence.
In fact, if you’re in business, indeed any type of organization, then you’re in the business of influence.
This book contends that the business of influence is broken. At least that’s how the popular press might report it. If you want to consider it through the lens of more cerebral media, you’d say that the current strategic approach to influence and the structure, processes and evaluation of influence are not fit for purpose. If the business of influence were to suddenly occur to us right now, relieving us for one hypothetical moment of the historic baggage of past political, economic, social and technological forces, traditions, language and happenstance, we’d suggest something quite different. It would take much greater advantage of the capabilities of the latest information technology and be far better aligned to its raison d’être courtesy of recent insights into business strategy.
We need such a rethink. Not for academic purposes. Not for ‘wouldn’t it be nice if’ daydreaming. But for real, practical application to improve operational effectiveness and efficiency and to delight more stakeholders more often and more profitably.
We need such a rethink because information technology has revolutionized communications, massively and irrevocably. The authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto asserted back in 1999 that the Internet allows markets to revert to the days when a market was defined by people gathering and talking among themselves about buyer and seller reputation, product quality and prices. This was lost for a while as the scale of organizations and markets outstripped the facility for consumers to coalesce. But the consumers’ conversation and participation are now well and truly re-ignited, and the mechanics, the variables and parameters of the ebb and flow of influence within each and every market have been transformed.
Moreover, we’re only a fraction of the way through this information technology revolution. Things are about to get faster.
This book explains where we’ve come from and where we’re heading. It identifies the changes that organizations and individual practitioners must pursue to remain relevant and delight those stakeholders more often and more profitably, and provides a roadmap from here to there.
This book is about your organization, your profession and your career. As with all changes to the competitive landscape, the earliest adopters and adapters will secure competitive advantage for their organization and for themselves, while the laggards will suffer competitive disadvantage. And quickly.
The Questions This Book Seeks to Answer
In rethinking the modern processes of influence, we address four big questions:
Following the rise of social media, how can we make sense of the noise in our marketplace to help us to achieve our objectives and beat our competitors?
How should the influence processes permeate the organization more systematically and measurably, accruing its practitioners more authority and accountability in the boardroom?
What big trends must everyone in the business of influence get to grips with?
Who does this stuff? What traits and skills are demanded of the modern practitioner?
Let’s take a very brief look at each question:
Q1. Following the rise of social media, how can we make sense of the noise in our marketplace to help us to achieve our objectives and beat our competitors?
Social media has ascended so quickly that today only a minority media remain without a social component. The Six Influence Flows™ provides a new model for the ways in which the motivating and deterring influence factors go around and come around, addressing every stakeholder – a model that can then inform your organization’s structural and cultural design.
We review the current state of integrated marketing communications and the latest and imminent innovations in social Web analytics. We introduce the ethics of analytics, and make the argument that you should invest as much resource into being influenced as you dedicate to influencing others – after all, improving your sensitivity to your stakeholders’ thoughts and feelings can only improve your abilities to address their needs and concerns, and live up to their desires and aspirations more diligently. It stands to reason.
Q2. How should the influence processes permeate the organization more systematically and measurably, accruing its practitioners more authority and accountability in the boardroom?
I introduce the Influence Scorecard™. Named in homage to the Balanced Scorecard approach to business performance management, it’s a management approach rather than a yardstick per se. It helps an organization to identify which influence processes it wishes to differentiate to its competitive advantage (its influence strategy) and helps to translate influence (marketing, PR, customer service, etc.) objectives into operational objectives, plans and action, potentially demanding new or revised structures and processes.
We discuss what constitutes best practice in measurement and evaluation, and the nature of complexity and chaos in your marketplace. We differentiate between influencer-centric and influence-centric measurement. We show how the Influence Scorecard guides the selection of measurement criteria and the ways in which these measurements can be made and presented for incorporation into business performance management (BPM) approaches such as the Balanced Scorecard.
The Influence Scorecard informs the mechanism for learning from these measures and adjusting influence tactics and strategy accordingly. Importantly, it finally puts to rest the seemingly unending debate about return on investment in the context of marketing and PR type activities.
Q3. What big trends must everyone in the business of influence get to grips with?
We’re in fast-moving times, but the candidates for ‘big trends’ stand out clearly. First, there’s the mobile phone, and smartphones more specifically. And this takes us quickly on to all the other things we’re all interacting with today and tomorrow – the so-called Internet of Things.
This segues neatly into the fresh imperatives of privacy and data ownership, before we take a leap a little further into the future with the advent of buyer marketing. We complete the big trends with an introduction to the semantic Web (a.k.a. Web 3.0).
Q4. Who does this stuff? What traits and skills are demanded of the modern practitioner?
I introduce the Chief Influence Officer and the influence professional.
The influence professional represents the convergence of the historically siloed disciplines that exert influence on stakeholders and need to be influenced by stakeholders – PR, marketing, customer service, HR, operations, etc.
Influence professionals understand every option at their disposal to influence and be influenced, and are trained in selecting the right mix of the right approaches at the right time, marking possibly the most distinct departure from the traditional marketing processes manifest to date.
Incumbents know the state of all Six Influence Flows with all key stakeholders at any point in time, and evangelize and embed the Influence Scorecard approach. They are sensitized to their organizations’ environments and their organizations’ responses to them in a way that makes many CMOs, for example, look as if they work in little bubbles today.
The Business Context
The marketing and PR professions remain relatively unscientific. They are almost the last business disciplines to be transformed by information and communication technologies, and are now going through the same technology-fuelled convulsions that accounting, manufacturing, logistics and retail, for example, underwent in previous decades.
The structure, processes and too frequently blinkered specialism of its practitioners hold back most marketing and PR teams from recognizing that their objectives, activity and associated measurement and evaluation, must work in orchestrated harmony with other disciplines to deliver specific business outcomes. It is still too common, for example, to hear a practitioner or senior manager say that PR and customer service are two separate functions, or fail to gel marketing and PR with product development. If that’s not frustrating enough, even getting marketing and PR to work together beautifully can be difficult.
This disorder is increasingly recognized as such, particularly as newer digital aspects bring new types of personality into marketing and PR roles (which is how I, a Chartered Engineer, came to be in this position). The more adaptable practitioners and informed management are beginning to look for new ways to define and synchronize these essential functions and interweave them more closely into the human and informational fabric of an organization.
And not a moment too soon.
The information and communication technology industry’s relentless progression is accelerating. All kinds of organizations continue to embrace technology to create new revenue opportunities, improve productivity and communicate with stakeholders. Consumers continue their aggressive adoption of information and communication technology powered products and services, with the inevitable continued evolution of their individual and collective behaviours.
Web 2.0 rocked marketing and PR, but so-called Web 3.0 is already in the ascendancy. If Web 2.0 is about social participation and (user generated) content, Web 3.0 – more precisely known as the semantic Web – entails the Web understanding the meaning of this participation and content. Wikipedia is undergoing a semantic Web transformation right now, an initiative known as dbpedia. The BBC and the UK Government are already there with the bbc.co.uk and data.gov.uk websites respectively, as is Tesco with some of its websites. Tests show that Google has already tweaked its PageRank algorithm (which determines the search results returned in response to a search query) to boost the rankings of semantically marked-up content over equivalent non-semantic content,1 constituting one serious reason by itself for marketers to understand what’s going on here.
What about the Internet of Things, the term describing the connection of devices to the Internet beyond the typical computer and smartphone? In 2008 Fiat introduced the facility for drivers of some of its vehicles to collect data about their driving style, upload it to the Web and share that information with the company. Nike and Apple joined forces that same year to facilitate the collection, analysis and social sharing of personal performance data in running and other sports. Samsung and others now make Internet TVs capable of collecting data about viewing habits that can be directed into a recommendation engine. Walmart widened the focus of its RFID2 (digital tags often attached to pallets, boxes and products) rollout from its distribution centres to its stores back in 2007, and Tesco has employed RFID since 2003.
This technological, commercial and cultural revolution is playing out today, yet many organizations still use the structure they have used for many years for their sales, operations, customer service, marketing and PR teams, and external agency, the same marketing strategies (except for the addition of Facebook and Twitter ‘strategies’), and the same marketing processes and soft integration with the wider organizations.
The most dynamic and successful organizations are beginning to explore different ways of working, making the status quo simply untenable for all organizations and marketing professionals in the medium term.
Influenceprofessional.com
Better a book go unread than fail to influence the reader – then the author has wasted the reader’s time too.
We have been influenced when we think in a way we wouldn’t otherwise have thought, or when we do something we wouldn’t otherwise have done. In seeking then to nourish that thinking and focus that action, this book is accompanied by a website at www.influenceprofessional.com. It aspires to be a community-driven website that aims to:
provide a discussion forum pivoting around the opinions and assertions presented in this book and associated perspectives and thought leadership from other sources;
cultivate agreement on what skills the influence professional must have, and what might be nice-to-haves, with links to books, blogs, training collateral, events and other resources;
give aspiring influence professionals the opportunity to ask questions of experts and each other, and share their experiences.
I do hope you have the time and energy to join in. I very much look forward to meeting you, learning what you think about this book and learning from your experiences and insights.
1WHERE WE ARE TODAY
When I first mooted this book with friends and associates in the marketing and PR profession, a common thread emerged in response. Although it was expressed in many different ways, it boiled down to this: there’s change fatigue.
The marketing and PR professional has had to get to grips with quite a lot during the past decade, and this section aims to provide a whistle-stop tour of that journey and where we find ourselves today, but in that response lies the answer.
Change in business should never be for the sake of change. Change has been demanded of marketing, public relations, customer service and other aspects of business by social, technological, environmental, legal and economic factors, and the marketing, PR and other professionals have reacted with varying degrees of success – reactive change.
This book, however, is championing proactive change – proactive in consolidating the multiple adaptations made reactively, and proactive in restructuring, repositioning, regearing and empowering the influence processes as organizational lifeblood, delivering competitive advantage for the organization and the individual practitioner.
Of course, laggards to this opportunity will find themselves having to react. Such is life.
Let’s look a bit more closely at where marketing and PR are today.
The Cluetrain and Permission Marketing
The Cluetrain Manifesto3 and Permission Marketing,4 both of 1999, were the first signposts that the status quo of marketing and public relations was about to end, and relatively abruptly. And from a personal perspective that was just fine – I was still in my twenties with comparatively little marketing and PR experience, so I was joining advantageously at just the moment when the rules were changing.
With a collection of assertions and a call to action, the Cluetrain authors painted a frank, unambiguous vision of the way in which the Internet would affect the way in which individuals communicate and organize, and the responses this revolution would demand of organizations.
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter – and getting smarter faster than most companies.
These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.
The authors, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, created a storm. On one side, the so-called digerati fanned the flames and, some would say, adopted the Manifesto quasi-religiously. The sceptics on the other side called the whole thing a cult and claimed that not much would change in the long run. The detractors contended that it was more hype than substance, much like the ‘dotcom’ bubble that was inflating and then popping around them at the time.
The detractors were wrong.
Consumers today check how others rate products and services before taking the plunge themselves, and they share their thoughts for outstanding and substandard service openly and with brutal honesty. The term ‘conversational marketing’ is now considered by many marketing and PR firms to be a core service or skill, and there is hardly a marketing or PR expert who doesn’t chime up with the need for brands to be authentic or open or transparent – words that were applied considerably less often in this context during the 20th century. Information and communication technologies, and the corresponding cultural shifts, have, as the Cluetrain authors put it, rekindled ‘human to human’ conversations. ‘Markets are conversations.’ The inference is simply that this marks the end of the ‘us and them’ divide, or big corporate ‘versus’ the little guy.
As a compliment to the Cluetrain authors’ focus on dialogue and public relations, Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing attacked the sacred cow, advertising:
You can define advertising as the science of creating and placing media that interrupts the consumer and then gets him or her to take some action. That’s quite a lot to ask of thirty seconds of TV time or twenty-five square inches of the newspaper, but without interruption there’s no chance of action, and without action advertising flops. …
The ironic thing is that marketers have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they’re interrupting us even more!
And according to Kantar Media (formerly TNS Media Intelligence), advertising spend in the USA has grown further since then, albeit with some ups and downs mirroring the booms and busts along the way, from an inflation adjusted5 $115.1 billion in 19996 when Permission Marketing hit the bookshops, to $125.3 billion in 2009.7 Kantar Media reports 14 minutes of network ad messages per hour of prime time US network TV in Q4 2009, with a further 5 and 15 minutes of ‘brand appearances’ for scripted and unscripted programming, respectively. So, even more interruption?
Yet Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, penned a polemic for TechCrunch in March 2009 in which he asserts that advertising will fail because consumers do not trust it, they don’t want to view it, and mostly they don’t need it.8
Godin champions a new marketing approach substituting permission for interruption, and interestingly his four tests of permission marketing ended up bearing more than a passing resemblance to facets of public relations:
1.
Does every single marketing effort you create encourage a learning relationship with your customers? Does it invite customers to ‘raise their hands’ and start communicating?
2.
Do you have a permission database? Do you track the number of people who have given you permission to communicate with them?
3.
If consumers gave you permission to talk to them, would you have anything to say? Have you developed a marketing curriculum to teach people about your products?
4.
Once people become customers, do you work to deepen your permission to communicate with those people?
Hugh MacLeod pulls no punches, as cartoonists are want to do: ‘If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.’9
By 2006, those sceptics of the social Web revolution were increasingly subdued or simply converted. Time Magazine chose ‘You’ as Time Person of the Year, representing the millions of social media participants. Facebook removed its prior membership restrictions, opening its service up to everyone, and YouTube was the fastest growing Web service ever. The Wall Street Journal reported that YouTube was consuming more Internet capacity by its second birthday in 2007 than the entire Internet had in 200010 … even the British Royal Family got itself a YouTube channel11 in 2007.
At the Association of National Advertisers annual conference that year, A.G. Lafley, the Chief Executive of Procter & Gamble, said: ‘Consumers are beginning in a very real sense to own our brands and participate in their creation … We need to learn to begin to let go.’12 David Meerman Scott then described the fall of traditional mass media marketing, and crystallized the ramifications, opportunities and challenges for the marketing and PR world with The New Rules of Marketing and PR.13 It became an international best seller, available in some 26 languages.
A decade may feel like a long time when you’re in it, but historically one can only conclude that we have just witnessed an unprecedented, massive, fast and irreversible transformation.
Perhaps you might interpret the 9% hike in US ad spend in the decade to 2009 as proof that nothing has changed; or perhaps that advertising is migrating away from spray ‘n’ pray to a more intelligent, targeted and responsive model; or perhaps that marketers are panicking; or perhaps that new digital ad formats have just been too tempting, or indeed an improvement on the old straightforward interruption. Fortunately, we don’t need to answer that question here. We simply have to view the matter through the eyes and ears of your customers and other stakeholders, who make no informed distinction between different marketing and communications methods, only knowing what they like, listening when you respond to their questions and points of view and needs and aspirations, and filtering out the rest.
Marketing and Public Relations
Most readers of this book will be working in, studying, teaching or researching marketing and/or PR. Others will be working in other disciplines central to influence, such as sales and customer service, or senior management figures or management consultants keeping up with the latest ideas. Regardless, I hope you won’t mind if we invest some time defining both marketing and PR. Why? Well, this book wants to map out a journey from A to B, and navigating to B is so much easier if we’re all at A to begin with. Moreover, experts don’t agree …
Marketing
In its 2009 paper, Marketing and the 7Ps,14 the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) defines marketing as ‘the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably’. The paper continues:
… the customer is at the heart of marketing, and businesses ignore this at their peril.
In essence, the marketing function is the study of market forces and factors and the development of a company’s position to optimise its benefit from them. It is all about getting the right product or service to the customer at the right price, in the right place, at the right time. Both business history and current practice remind us that without proper marketing, companies cannot get close to customers and satisfy their needs. And if they don’t, a competitor surely will.
However, the CIM recognized in its 2007 Tomorrow’s World15 paper that its definition harks back to 1976 and could do with an update. The paper identifies a number of reasons why a revision may be needed, including:
The discipline has become more sophisticated, possibly demanding subdivision into three broad paths: science, arts and humanities
The idea that marketing is no longer a separate role but something everyone in an organization does to a greater or lesser degree
The technology revolution has altered the dynamic between an organization and its customers, increasing the power of the customer (the rebalancing we referred to earlier in this chapter)
