Found on the concrete ground just past the exit turnstiles, before the stairs, of the Vandam Street exit of the downtown-bound C train (Spring Street stop).

I’d love to know the story behind this scene…

Who prints a nice note like that on their computer rather than writing it by hand?  And why were there multiple copies of the note on the ground, rather than just one?

The roses had been trampled by hundreds of commuters by the time I got there.

We wrote not so long ago about implications of this fact for brands themselves, offering five catalysts for recognizing it and doing something about it through their IMC process.

But there are implications for us — the marketers within the agencies that service those brands — as well.

Because if we are expert communicators hired to give advice to brands, and if a brand’s business operations do indeed communicate a great deal to consumers, then by the transitive property, agencies need to be prepared to offer an informed point of view on how operations can better communicate to a given audience.

But the marketing industry is, by and large, unable to do so.

There are reasons why.  Client organizations are (largely) siloed places, where the lady who sources materials for the product in question doesn’t talk with the CRM guy.  Even more rarely will they work to integrate their respective efforts.

On our side, agency structures are (largely) mirrors of client structures, with each agency growing a up around a specific channel or discipline. (See Jonah Bloom’s plea to not create yet another silo for social media.)

Folks at agencies do not think outside their particular discipline because there is no business incentive to do so.  The structure they work in does not encourage it.  In fact, I might argue that it actively discourages it.

All to say, agency business structures themselves have to change before we as an industry are able to affect any kind of change beyond what is traditionally defined as “marketing.”

In other words, a brand’s business operations will continue to communicate a great deal to consumers, but it will only be in the rarest of cases that anyone at a standard-issue agency will be able to do anything about it, beyond watch it happen from the sidelines, of course.

[photo of silos by sightclutter]

[x-posted from House of Naked]

Now, this is a point of view that we here at Naked can get behind.  We have long held the philosophy that everything communicates.

But if this is true — if the way a company operates internally can be such a powerful tool for marketing and shaping a consumer’s perception of and experience with a brand — then we have to stop a minute and consider the implications for the brand in question.

To have operations become a de facto function of marketing, then the process by which marketing is created at the vast majority of companies in this country will need to be fundamentally changed.

Because at the end of the day, true integrated marketing communications (IMC) is really about process.  A great idea is worthless without the ability to implement it.

We’ve written a good bit recently about this:  That the brand’s internal business structure is a key component of implementing IMC.  That our collective interestingness needs to be encouraged, rather than institutionalized, through structure.  That sexy is the process.

Enough theory, let’s take a step towards the real world.  For your consideration, here are a handful of catalysts for a healthy IMC process:

1) Structural cross-pollination. Accept that all facets of the organization have to work together to achieve IMC, and set up a better structure to facilitate cross-pollination.  As Adrian of Zeus Jones (correctly, in my experience) points out in the comments section of his post, most companies are not currently structured in a way to be able to coordinate programs. We’ve written more on business structure here.

Practically speaking, though, this is a huge undertaking — the nuclear option.  Most of us don’t have the authority or experience to overhaul a business structure.  So…

2) Believe. We all have to agree that operations (and everything else, for that matter) are in fact marketing — at least, the bits of our operations that will have an impact on the end consumer.  Everything communicates.  Really.

3) Think holistically. We have to think and work within our particular area of responsibility, but the challenge is to also see the bigger picture as we do so.  Understand all the ways that consumer can interact with our brand, and the different ways that each interaction contributes to the overall perception of our brand.  Our brand behavior should provide a guide for interacting in all of these places.

4) Champion. Someone has to herd the kittens.  In other words, someone has to spearhead the coordination of all the different departments and responsibilities, and get them all moving in the same direction. Recently, CMOs seem to be getting more and more responsibility within their respective organizations, beginning to address this need. Who is that person within your company?

5) Orchestrate. All pieces of communications should fit together and “talk” with one another to create a cohesive brand experience for the consumer. There should be no dead-ends in that experience.

[picture credit: cybjorg]

[x-posted from House of Naked]

So if that’s true, is there something to be learned about our own work from how other creative industries function?

Louis Menand, of The New Yorker, recently reviewed “The Program Era” by Mark McGurl, a look at how creative writing is taught in universities in America.  McGurl’s premise: “…given that most of the fiction that Americans write and read is processed through the higher-education system, we ought to pay some attention to the way the system affects the outcome.”

The overarching question posed by the review, however, was whether creative writing can be taught in the first place.  It is taught, of course, but is that teaching fruitful?  Can we really (oxymoronically?) institutionalize creativity?

As a marketer, this is the interesting corollary for me.  Because we have, in effect, institutionalized our corner of the creative world as well.  So shouldn’t we pay some attention to the way our system affects the outcome?  Or put another way, does our form institutionalization produce truly creative work?

Even among proponents of the current system of creative writing programs (they tend to be the ones who already have a vested interest in their success) admit that the truly creative, the people who are able to truly inspire, tend to be the exception to the rule.  They cannot be taught; they have “it” innately within them already.

While many are content to crow about the success of their graduates, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the preeminent creative writing program in the country, stakes no claim on the success of their writers — they say they encourage, rather than make, good writers.  (They have always said this; this is not a new thing.) From their website:

If one can “learn” to play the violin or to paint, one can “learn” to write, though no processes of externally induced training can ensure that one will do it well. Accordingly, the fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us. We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country, in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged.

I admire this point of view, and think the world of marketing can potentially take a page out of their book. Some thoughts on implications for marketing folks:

1. Talent needs disparate sources. If talent cannot be taught — if it can be discovered anywhere — then we should broaden our horizons of where we look for talent.  Better talent isn’t necessarily the one who have a traditional background, but rather who have been influences by disparate sources.  Faris has written about a need for “renaissance” planners and BBH has put out a call to “mash up & mutate our teams and approaches.”

2. We need an appropriate structure first. Here’s the crucial corollary to the prior point: Once we have found these people, the things that made them exceptional to begin with cannot be thrown away. Their talent needs to be encouraged. Which means that we need to create a structure in which these renaissance planners and their ideas can continue to be influenced and nurtured.  We need to learn to let go more, like the Iowa Writer’s Workshop has managed to do.

I fervently believe that the second point above is actually the most important thing to get right.  Get the structure right and you can start to unlock the “renaissance” in every one of us.

(I’ve written before about the idea of a business structure that makes IMC work, and that IMC really is about process, not output.)

Because we all have some modicum of talent and interestingness somewhere within us, right?  I hope? So maybe it’s just about making sure the structure of our jobs helps to unlock it, rather than forcing us down the assembly line yet again.

[x-posted from House of Naked]

Smokin’ Joe is saying that you can’t just waltz into the ring with a quick wit, charm, and good intentions — you have to have the substance to back it up.  (Or, at least, I can’t ever seem to get by that way…)

It underscores that other great quote, about genius being 99% perspiration.

Consider this as well: It takes 10,000 hours of work to master a given discipline.  Any discipline.  (Malcolm Gladwell expounds on this view of genius at the New Yorker’s “Stories from the Near Future” conference in 2007.)

Think about that for a minute — it turns the nature of genius on its head.  It says that a relatively smart person, one willing to work really hard at something, can eventually master that thing.  It doesn’t necessarily require in-born ability.  Nurture trumps nature.

I think we all take it as a truism — that it’s hard work that makes a person (or a brand) great. Having a good idea (the inspiration) is actually, counterintuitively, the easy part. It’s much tougher work to figure out how to make that idea live and work in the real world.

How does this apply to marketing?

We work in a creative business.  Ideas are our stock and trade.  But sometimes too much credence is paid to the so-called “Big Idea.”

It’s not that a Big Idea (or creative idea, or marketing platform, or whatever it is you call it) isn’t important.  It is.

But the Big Idea is akin to the 1% inspiration — it’s just the beginning of the story.  The real sexy comes when we bring that idea to life and make it walk and talk, make it interact with the regular folks like you and me who are going to buy and use the brand in question.

Sexy is the 99% perspiration. Sexy is the process.

All of which to say, integrated marketing communications (IMC) is first and foremost a process.  IMC is not an output — we don’t deliver an IMC by the end of a project. IMC is about how we work.

IMC is getting all the different silos of your organization, all the agencies, and all the other various stakeholders — most of whom have slightly or wildly different agendas and priorities — aligned and pulling in the same direction.

It’s about orchestrating all the pieces of communications that your brand creates (and after all, everything communicates, right?) so they collectively create something that is greater than their individual pieces, that creates a holistic experience for the consumer.

As with so many terms and buzzwords, we all probably have a different definition of and experience with IMC.  But here’s what I know: True IMC is a process — it is the road work that lets us shine under the bright lights.

[x-posted from House of Naked]

First, let’s take the title of the post I read — what does it mean for a wire or a computer or a website to behave like a human? Start with a guy named Alan Turing, and his eponymous test. From Wikipedia:

It was described by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in which Turing considers the question “can machines think?” Since “thinking” is difficult to define, Turing chose to “replace the question by another which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.”

[This picture is the] “standard interpretation” of the Turing Test, in which player C, the interrogator, is tasked with trying to determine which player — A or B — is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to written questions in order to make the determination.

Okay, so what does this have to do with marketing?

So much of what we in the marketing world do is about anthropomorphizing brands. (How ’bout that recent Honda “let it shine” video, for one example?) We write strategies and briefs describing a brand’s personality, which manifests in content, or the choice of producer, the style of art direction, or tone of voice. Or at Naked, as Michelle described, a brand personality will likely manifest as a whole behavior system, guiding all aspects of the business.

The assumption is that the more human-like a brand is, the better we as consumers will be able to relate to it and, presumably, the more readily we will buy the product or service in question.

Assume for a minute that we are getting better at making brands feel more human. (There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, but let’s suspend disbelief for just a minute, okay?)

If all things converge at infinity, and especially as channels and opportunities for interaction continue to increase, then we then have to assume that the line between human and brand will continue to blur — marketing communications will eventually be subject to a test like Turing’s.

There are signs that this is necessary already:

- Facebook’s redesign made brand pages look and function more like people pages

- So many brands tweet as if they’re people

- Time Magazine recently tried to poll its readers, only to find it couldn’t tell which votes came from real people and which came from spam bots, despite using reCAPTCHA.

- The granddaddy of them all is Subservient Chicken.

But in the blog post that I mentioned at the top of this post, Ana argues that we actually need the opposite of a Turing test for our websites. She believes there should actually be a bright line: “The less ‘is it a human, or is it a machine?’ confusion, the better.”

I’m with Ana on this one. And the same is true for brands in general — the less confusion, the better.

After all, as we continue to be inundated with choice, our attention spans will continue to shorten. (Did you know, for example, that the average length of time consumers spend on a given website is now only 56 seconds??) A brand has fewer opportunities and less time to make an impact on a consumer.

So the Turing test is out. For marketing communications, a test for efficacy needs to mark a different line. Rather than testing for how human a brand is — because do we really want to be friends with a laundry detergent? — we test for the ability to create a consumer relationship in a compacted amount of time.

So it’s about clarity of intentions and the value brought. In short, it’s about honesty.

As with Turing’s test, the honesty test is simple and binary — it either is or isn’t. And it is a personal and subjective test — a brand might pass my honesty test, but fail yours.

If the desires of the brand are transparent, and if the brand brings you some kind of value — say, function or interestingness — then it passes the test. You are eager/able to forget or ignore that the brand ultimately wants you to help pad its bottom line.

If brand in question brings nothing relevant to you, if it is only trying to sell you something and you end up resent, or if it is just bloviating (again), then it does not.

[x-posted from the House of Naked]