Marketing: Be Prepared to Be Surprised. Very Surprised
Some steps marketers
take are easy. They feel like baby steps, being a little shaky on the
legs, but in retrospect they are not so difficult. For example, Facebook
fan acquisition…. Many brands have mastered that. Read all about MTV’s journey to 100 million fans here, Disney’s here.
Social media marketing takes new skills, for sure, but the beauty of
social media is that most of us can acquire those skills – it is a
democratising medium. By definition it is accessible.
So I don’t imagine social will be a big differentiator going forward. It simply can’t be. My view,
expressed elsewhere, is that the wrong data model lies behind social, anyway. It will be disrupted.
Outside of social, a few marketers are taking on a much larger remit, like becoming the source of innovation for the enterprise.
In that role
the marketer helps redefine
the purpose of the business. If marketers don’t do that, then CIOs will
or innovation will be left to languish with the
Chief Innovation Officer, a title without a strategic role in many organizations.
A great example of the marketer at the heart of innovation is
GE and its ecomagination and
healthymagination programs. I got talking to Beth Comstock, CMO at GE last week about
healthymagination, a program I think exemplifies three big concerns for marketers-as-innovators.
#1. Marketing as an enterprise-wide innovation engine
Beth says that GE is trying to define contemporary marketing:
“We’ve been on a journey at GE over the past decade to define
contemporary marketing. At GE we expect marketers to be innovative, to
be involved in innovation and to understand the ecosystem as a source of
innovation–to understand new business models and to take the core of a
technology and know how to get that into the market.”
The healthymagination challenge is part of GE’s $1 billion commitment to tackle cancer, specifically breast cancer. When
I wrote about it a few months back I pointed out that GE seemed to have no conventional ROI metrics for the program.
Rather it was about this process of redefining the place of a large
enterprise in a global society beset by big issues. Healthymagination,
launched in May 2009 with a public challenge launched in September 2011,
is an attempt to recreate or reform the ecosystem in breast
cancer diagnosis and care. For GE it has a broader significance.
“Healthymagination is an innovation platform that allows us to work
across the entire organization,” says Beth. “It is a way for us in
marketing to identify the new ecosystem. It is a way of saying, we don’t
have all the answers, so let’s open it up and see how we establish
value.”
So companies really need to develop projects that have a scale and
significance that lets them see how markets are shaping up, where the
value lies, and what types of partnerships will bring success to the
range of parties involved.
Healthymagination announced the winners of round 1 of its challenge, two weeks ago.
The surprise is all the winners are at a seed stage – and remember
VCs and large enterprises don’t do seed funding? They do now.
#2. Shared value and ecosystems in contemporary marketing
An important part of the new language of marketing is the ecosystem.
Once you see your role as being ecosystem-based, you have to think about
shared value.
Shared value is a way of acknowledging a need to return value to all parties in an ecosystem.
“There are 5000 marketers here at GE who are passionate about shared
value. The problems we are focused on – health, environment,
transportation – have become too big for any one company to solve on its
own,” says Beth. In other words they
have to be ecosystem-based.
Far from being an alternative to “maximising shareholder value” the
idea of shared value is to put a placeholder on a market in flux, that
says, “we’ll get fair shares out of this”. Trust me!
Ecosystems are always evolving and need a new type of trust. So
marketers who are worried about trust in social media environments
should walk this way and take responsibility for change. It might help
them build genuine bonds again.
“The ecosystem is often being redefined,” Beth says. “For example one
of our healthymagination challenge awardees, Fred Hutchinson Cancer
Research, is working with the Uganda Cancer Research institution in
Kampala on breast cancer diagnoses.
They’re working together, bringing many players into the
mix–education, Government, the health service, technology companies, the
start-up community—to establish a program where women can receive
education about breast cancer and those with symptoms will be offered
clinical breast exam and breast ultrasound. This is a new kind of
ecosystem, it’s not just a set of academic institutions. We also have a
project in Saudi Arabia where we are collaborating with NGOs to develop
different ways of thinking about screening.”
From GE’s point of view market research seems now to be as much about
understanding how these relationships will work as it is about
targeting a need. But in the end of course it is still about a sale.
Comstock offers her explanation:
“Why we’ve invested so much in marketing is to learn and to do the
research, especially observational research. To do this well, you really
have to embed yourself within the ecosystem. With some of the reverse
innovation work we do in India, for example, we were able to observe how
high tech baby warmers need to take into account power supply
interruptions and battery back-up in the Indian market. We embraced a
start-up that created a $25 baby warmer so now when women leave a
hospital, they have high tech technology in a low tech format. That’s
the kind of thing you can expect to see us doing with
healthymagination.”
#3. Operating at a more granular level in developing new markets
The third lesson for marketers and a defining characteristic of good
marketing going forward will be engagement at the earliest stages in
renewal. If you’ve been following the
discussion on my RIM post,
you’ll notice a number of insights from commenters on the inability of
companies like RIM to create a strategic options portfolio, a
continuously evolving portfolio of options to move or not move in a
variety of markets.
“The first winners in the healthymagination challenge are early stage
ideas,” says Beth. “Much earlier than our partners or GE are used to
investing in. Because it’s such early stage, we’ve awarded seed funding;
this type of investment lets us marry those winners with our businesses
and mentor them, so there will be great dialogue there.
The first challenge was focused on triple negative breast cancer,
which is a very tough challenge, so we are taking a very thoughtful
approach to the winners and awards. And we are entering partnerships
much earlier than we are used to doing.”
The argument against rich options portfolios has often been “the
innovators dilemma”. Dare we create new options that might kill the
Golden goose?
I think it’s a thing of the past for executives who see their roles
as option generators, being in early in many new markets to capture
options, whether they are ultimately mainstreamed or not.
