Have you ever been to one of those corporate off-sites? You know the ones I mean – where the agenda is filled with all kinds of progressive, well-intentioned paradigm shifting, super-important initiatives. And then, when you get there, it’s nothing but a series of 45 slide PowerPoint presentations where the presenter reads every word of each slide.
This is usually followed by checking email in the hallway (to get real work done), then a lively “life coach” in the afternoon that you just know lives in a van down by the river. And then it’s all wrapped up with an awards dinner of chicken, beef or fish, a bad comedian and copious amounts of alcohol.
The first part of that was what the “bi-partisan” Healthcare Summit held this week inWashington looked like to me. No matter which side of the argument you fall on, it was as if they all got together beforehand and said “let’s get an off-site meeting together. We’ll get everybody motivated, and I’m sure we’ll get a lot done”. Even when every collective eye rolled, they did it anyway.
Obama, ever the good CEO, set the tone in the beginning by reminding everyone why they were all there. Then each attendee, in turn, gave their opinion of how to “shake things up” (the aforementioned PowerPoint presentations). The only difference with the Healthcare Summit was that every presentation was the same! Republicans “No – let’s start over”. Democrats “We’re actually not that far apart”. John Stewart (and you must check out the John Oliver piece especially) had a wonderful take on this.
Sometimes when we look at today’s government it just looks like it’s intractable. The patterns are so deeply set – that it’s impossible for either side to break out of them.
The Difference Between A Rut And A Grave? Dimensions.
Our patterns in corporate marketing are sometimes remarkably similar. We can sometimes get so locked into our organizational politics, our processes, our agency relationships, our tactics, our media and even our own beliefs, that we are fearful to try new things.
In fact, we’re so desperately afraid of trying something new that we and our team never bring our unique selves to the table. Instead, we bring these corporate robotic voices that read PowerPoint slides like Ben Stein teaching class in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In short, every meeting with our agency, our team and our stakeholders become micro versions of the Healthcare Summit.
So, how do we break those patterns of mediocrity and work toward becoming extraordinary?
Well, let’s be honest – some don’t want to. A deeply set pattern like this can be safe and comfortable. And in some organizations, some who want to make changes, simply can’t to it within the organization’s structure – and they’ll eventually have to leave to become extraordinary. I really do believe though, that we all have the ability for extraordinary things – and that the choice to become remarkable is ours to make.
So, let’s look at the first, maybe most important step to break those patterns – and become extraordinary
Go Back To Your Future Self
Ask yourself this: Pretend you’re George McFly in Back To The Future (stay with me for a second). So, you’re George McFly (the Crispin Glover Dad McFly). And, you’re stuck in a rut. You can’t seem to break out and become something extraordinary. But you’re comfortable. It’s safe. It’s non-confrontational. It’s TV dinners, and the nice sedan parked out in the driveway.
Then, you have a dream. Or is it reality? You go back in time – back to when you first joined the company you’re with now. And in this team, in the middle of the night a space alien comes to visit you and gives you secret marketing tactics from the future. They’re new, creative, outside the box – and completely experimental. You wake up from this “dream” more excited, impassioned and inspired for your job than you’ve ever been before.
But then, as you take your 30 minute commute into work, doubt starts to creep in. What if it was just a dream? What if these tactics fail? What if these new strategies won’t work? As you walk into the office – everyone is sitting down to a big Marketing Meeting. The question is what do you do? Or, maybe just as importantly, what does the organization do if you actually get the courage to lay out these new ideas.
Permission To Fail Is The First Step
This is a huge challenge today. The reason the Healthcare Summit is a colossal waste of time is not because the attendees are unintelligent (John Stewart’s take aside). It’s because our government has no permission to fail. Any failure – no matter how small and whether it’s strategic, legislative, ethical, moral or procedural is overblown to such an extreme as to strike fear into taking any action at all.
This is what we must be mindful of in our marketing decisions. The sea change going on right now in marketing philosophy is teaching us that smaller, more frequent and more engaged experimentation with our customers is proving to be successful. But it’s new. And “new” doesn’t always become “new and improved”.
And, while technology makes this experimentation less risky, it also becomes more measurable. And measurability is a double-edged sword if wielded as a “proof point” rather than a “tool for insight”.
As the ability to measure everything becomes more pronounced, we must not become a slave to those numbers. We must have permission, as Winston Churchill said to “move from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” This is a huge key in what ultimately makes us successful as digital marketers. This is what makes us extraordinary.
Are You Extraordinary?
In a recent blog post, Seth Godin reminds us of why it’s not always obvious that your product or service should be “remarkable” or “over the top”. But whether your organization is marketing a “once in a lifetime experience” or a “the most cost-efficient way to get to Albuquerque” – the key is that YOU are remarkable. YOU are an extraordinary marketer.
Getting, and keeping, permission to fail both from yourself and the organization you advise is an important first step in that journey. It’s what enables risk and passion and ultimately success.
Professor Philip Kotler, who I started reading in college, and still read today summed it up well. In his book Kotler On Marketing, How To Create, Win, and Dominate Marketshe said that “successful companies will be the few who can keep their marketing changing as fast as their market place”.
I might humbly change that quote just a bit and say that today’s extraordinary marketers will be the few who can keep their organization’s marketing changing as fast as their consumers.
What do you think makes a marketer extraordinary?
