Ian M Rountree

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Archives for January 2010

What is Marketing in 2010? (or) How Meta Can You Get-a?

January 30, 2010 by Ian 5 Comments

I’m still trying to figure this out. I don’t have a marketing background, a technology background, or even a business background. I have a sales background – I’ve been dealing with people, confronting their hangups and counselling them through difficult decisions for most of my life. Solving problems for people is a part of my make-up, a core piece of who I am. When people ask what I do at work, it’s difficult for me to admit I fall into the category of a retailer, or even a salesperson. Retailing and sales are related to marketing, certainly, but it’s more of a kissing cousins relationship than a fraternal twins relationship. The perception, however, is the same of all three; high pressure pitches, manufacturing concept whenever we’re not begging for coerced permission.

That’s not my process. I’m a facilitator. I build a bank of information, contacts and products and then I get people what they need.

So when I see companies purporting to do the same thing I do (whether in the same space or not), but failing terribly at communicating this, I get a bit frustrated. We all get a little freakedout by businesses behaving badly, even people pretending to be businesses, and its worse when I see it locally. Part of this, I’m aware, comes form my lack of understanding of the space – sales is as different from retailing as it is from marketing, after all, and with so many self-declaring experts around, it’s growing increasingly hard to tell who’s legitimate and who’s not.

Is it positioning, or is it posturing?

The first important question to ask if you’re trying to figure out anything about how someone’s acting is whether they’ve got something real backing them or not. Snake oil salesmen talk a certain way, dyed in the wool producers speak an entirely different language. Part of my job as a facilitator is to learn to speak every language there is, and communicate my bank of options to whomever I speak with in a way that matches their understanding and perspective. Still, it gets really easy to tell when someone wants a massive television because they think it’s going to be some kind of social proof for them, or when another person wants the same television because they sit ten feet back and have poor eye sight.

What does this have to do with marketing?

As I understand it, marketing is sales on a macro level. For decades, it’s been a disconnected medium, broadcast and wait. Over the last few years, the gap between people and their brands has been shrinking at an increasing pace, and the process is leaving a lot of brands frightened, stiffening like deer in the headlights of an oncoming locomotive. People are getting bigger than their own skins, and brands are getting smaller as their mass media efforts take more and more of a back seat roll in the sales and business growth cycle. Will these channels ever disappear? Not likely. But we’re certainly seeing other avenues become far more measurable, effective, and ubiquitous. Why? Because everyone’s participating. People are more interested when they can serve themselves.

Remaining Meta Together.

There’s a power to celebrity that’s universally enticing. We all like to escape, to believe we’re kings and queens. And when we all have the ability to move so far beyond facilities served by others – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and so on – and build our own platforms, our own brands, and do our own marketing… Well, that’s even more exciting than following celebrity, it’s becoming celebrity. Creating these self-legitimizing personal platforms creates a kind of power for us we could never have had before, and it’s one that corporations aren’t yet equipped to process.

Because they can’t process it, the ball is in the court of anyone who can build that personal brand, and get just savvy enough to fake importance without looking too much like they’re posturing. It’s mostly a bluff. But it’s creating a brilliant, and very different skill set for those willing to explore the space with real curiosity, genuine interest, and an eye toward how the new world of ubiquitous, instant, and most interestingly thorough information exchange.

The place of passion in the land of liars.

As part of a promotion for The Art of Marketing, Mitch Joel ran a contest on his blog, asking for people to define marketing in 2010. Naturally, I tried to weigh in – but on further inspection, I think my answer was a little lacking. It felt like posturing, more than positioning. Mitch was asking about passion, drive, and innovation. Listening in on new channels, and deciphering their value is nothing new. There’s no innovation there. Is it necessary? Yes, absolutely. But it’s also done. Listening at the point of need is an integral part of what any business should be doing. Defining and recognizing new channels is nothing more than adding new sets of ears.

What is Marketing in 2010?

The short answer? I have no idea. So far, it doesn’t seem much different than marketing in 2009. Or sales in 2009, or 2008. What’s different isn’t part of what I’m doing yet. It’s nothing I can, in my daily work, do differently to increase my utility to others, their utility to each other, or my ability to grow the business I’m involved in.

The long answer? A lot more complicated. Whatever marketing in 2010 is, I’d love to find out. Because with all this attention and excitement going into it, I’m sure curious.

Wouldn’t you be?

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: art of marketing, be a facilitator, embarassingly meta, liars, market-forces, marketing, marketing in 2010, mitch joel, passion, retail, sales

Finding the Outliers – The Fallout of Reading the Book

January 30, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

Outliers (which I reviewed recently) has forced me to change a lot of what I consider success, and how I’m going about approaching it. So, I’ve got a question for you: Are you in the right place?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: book review, challenge, malcolm gladwell, video review, youtube

The Need for a Three Dimensional Economy

January 29, 2010 by Ian 6 Comments

Trik or Treat. on Flickr
Photo by peasap.

Just like declaring any technology dead has become a bad joke, talking about alternative economic models seems to be popping up more and more. What we’re seeing is exploration into concepts like Whuffie, or a Relevance-based economy, the kinds of systems that look so good and tempting on paper that we’re willing to buy into them, support them – but they haven’t taken off yet. Like the ideal of Communism, non-capital economies are not fully formed enough yet to be worth adopting on a broad scale.

There are more aspects to the current economic model than most people suspect. This is one of the reasons why systems like Whuffie can’t take off until they become inclusive, rather than replacement systems. We need to explore not just alternatives, but additives to our current money-for-property system, because as society expands and changes, physical property is being diminished in its importance.

The obvious system is linear. It exists on a continuum of “Money <> Product” where the exchange is similarly obvious; the more complex, or impressive the product, the more money it’s going to cost. This means you basically have one choice to make. Do you want to keep your money and have nothing, or do you want to get the physical item, the souvenir of the transaction that you want to enact, and forgo the agile utility of liquid asset?

Money economy is simple. It’s not, however, complex enough. Not in today’s society.

We’re not going to get rid of money any time soon. The playing field is not level enough between the have’s and the have-nots to allow such a ubiquitous, obvious capital to die. So what about adding another layer? We’re doing this already, with social capitals like Whuffie. Whuffie is a social proofing system (there’s a full explanation on Wikipedia, as well as the Whuffie Bank) by which a new continuum is proposed: that of “Action <> Respect” where respect becomes a universal capital, and the time and effort your actions entail becomes the trade for this capital. It’s a brilliant system, because respect is virtually  impossible to fake.

Replacing the monetary system with another linear system is a failing concept because of complexity issues. However, when we add to the one-dimensional monetary system another, totally offset system like the Whuffie-based Action <> Respect economy, what we see is a more accurate representation of how people make decisions. Like in a pure relevance economy we can’t expect people to make decisions solely based on money, here is an example  of what this two-dimensional system may come to look like:

I want a television. I look at the brands and models available. Five sets all cost the same in my size range, and all of them fit my budget. How do I decide? I choose based on the company’s image. I’ll pick on Samsung because I know there are good people working there. When all the prices are the same, price alone cannot aid my decision.

This feels like a much more human decision making process. I’ve now removed money from the process, because it’s irrelevant in this transaction, and replaced it with a differentiator involving reputation. Far more thorough. But what happens when the reputation metric falls over? After enough time, with all of the major corporations eventually getting involved in the social space, democratizing their brands and building personalities, the idea of Whuffie will fall apart in the corporate sense, because someone will eventually come up with a new system where no publicly visible missteps are made. While I admit this is a reduction of rationality, let’s say the scenerio is proven, and reputation does become a reliable commodity. What then?

Real depth.

What will that look like? How will we make decisions? I suspect it will look a lot like it does now. Let’s take a fairly complex scenario about purchasing and break it down:

I need to replace a laptop. I do the research, figure out what my real needs are, and find that both an Apple MacBook Pro, and a very high end PC, such as a Toshiba or even an Alienware would suit my tasks. Budget is no object. How do I decide? I take the question to my peers, who return with a resounding support of Apple from the set who likes Apple, and some mixed reviews of Toshiba, a couple of Alienware droolers, and someone offhand giving me a very intense explanation of why I need to consider an HP. What do I buy? The Apple fans always say Apple, so they failed to differentiate. The Toshibas always give mixed reviews. The Alienware droolers are doing my shopping for themselves, but that one dude who suggested the HP had damned good reasons for doing so. We’ll assume it also helps that I did my research following the tip, and found the information to be accurate. So I’ll go buy the HP.

We took care of money by presupposing it’s not an object. We took care of reputation by adjusting for our reactions from our friends. Relevance does not apply because my needs are straight forward enough that any machine on the market of a certain calibre will accomplish my goals. How did I make my decision? An outside force, not the company I was purchasing from, grabbed my attention with a real, human plea about quality, experience, reliability, or something else that actually, legitimately makes the brand stand out over the competition.

We ask our friends for approval of purchases all the time. We budget with our families. We save. We do research. Are any of these things recognized as part of the measurable economic process? Sure they are. There are multinational corporations banking on being the most innocuous, convenient option. Wal-Mart choices. This, I’d say, amounts to the third dimension of a real three-dimensional economy. The “Convenience <> Information” continuum, and it’s the most difficult one to master.

We say all the time in the shop that there’s nothing so dangerous to profit margin than an informed consumer. It’s true, even if it’s an oversimplification. At the moment, consumers who qualify as informed, do minimal research on Google or Bing or Yahoo and come away mostly with answers backing up their assumptions, because no one’s taught them how to use search effectively, and our culture is not exactly encouraging of reliable dynamic thinking like changing your mind based on Wikipedia. There are good reasons for this – for now. But those reasons are shrinking.

Any economic model not sufficiently complex to cover the agile way in which humans make decisions is a failing, imperfect system. This process is simpler than we think; all we have to be able to do is plot the options in a space, and relate that space to our own needs, expectations, and resources. This kind of relational thinking is exactly why we are what we are, and where we ourselves fit on this grid is what makes us as individuals who we are.

Rational thinking is linear. Placing money on the opposite side as physical goods is obvious, and rational. It worked for a long time as the easiest to communicate system, when there were so many barriers to acquisition. Now, however, with all of the barriers crumbling and every wall to commerce falling as quickly as society can allow it to – and with so much diversity in product and method and resource now available – a linear system, any purely linear system, must be called obsolete.

And now I’ve fallen into my own trap.

Where do you see opportunities for more relational thinking? Economics isn’t just for transactions of goods. Economy of effort, of time, these things have the same implications, and require the same skills and know-how to navigate effectively. But we have to do so in a manner that allows us to be conscious of where the effort we’re putting in goes. Where is your effort going?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: action, alienware, apple, esteban contreras, goods, HP, justin kownacki, linear system, money, relevance, respect, sociology, whuffie, whuffie bank, wikipedia

A Thought Experiment For The Weekend

January 29, 2010 by Ian 3 Comments

Today, I’m completely out of things to post.  have one more piece I’m working on for tomorrow, a reaction to something another blogger wrote. But then I’m out. No more topics.

Yep. Blogger’s Block.

So I’m going to try a thought experiment. I’d love it if you tried it with me, but I expect I’ll have to post the results first to make sure people get the idea.

What I’m going to do is examine two scenarios, both under the title of “If I Were Going To Be…”

The first of these “If I were going to be” scenarios examines what my current job would look like, if I were going to create the position myself, from the job description right up to day to day reporting and coaching. That’s going to be the easy one. Big, difficult, but easier than the next.

Because the second “If I were going to be” scenario is – of course – my dream job. It’s what I would be doing on a daily basis if I had my druthers and could work either for myself or for anyone else – whichever decision I end up coming to – and will likely look nothing like what you’d call a job. In essence, I’ll be writing a job description for my perfect life.

I expect the two posts to drop on Monday and Tuesday, as long as I can make them not conflict with the launch of The Dowager Shadow among other things on Tuesday. But the weekend will have to be mostly taking notes, so I may be tweeting quite a bit under the #thoughtexperiment hash tag.

I wonder how this will turn out.

For now, have a picture of my son, playing with his shadow.

Shadow Games on FLickr
Liam, playing with his shadow. Photo by me.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: bloggers block, thought experiment, weekend project, writer's block

Book Review – Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

January 28, 2010 by Ian 11 Comments

Outliers on FlickrI picked up Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success during the Christmas season from the HMV that’s next door to my store in the mall. It happened to be on sale, and I’d heard some decent reviews – I didn’t know what I was getting into, though. It’s not an overstatement to say that Outliers has changed something fundamental in how I do my work, what I see as my advantages, and where the idea of success has totally fallen down around my ears.

Let me explain.

The book is glibly subtitled “The Story of Success” but it’s really not. It’s the story of people who have taken opportunity where they saw it, and identified more accurately their strengths and interests, compared to the rest of us. I have to assume that this is either Gladwell’s summation of what success is, or that the latter simply didn’t fit on a cover as well. Either way, by about fifty pages in, my head had been blown clean off my shoulders about four times.

The first noggin knocker came with the formula the book would follow; identify a seemingly privileged set of people, or an individual, and examine the individual’s roots. Find out what it was that put this group or person where they are, and totally remove the shiny pedestal from their feet. This has helped me see celebrities in a new light, one that thankfully makes them more human.

The second came from Gladwell’s style. He’s a journalist, and it shows, but he’s also a phenomenal storyteller. As a writer myself, I’m always really interested in how authors compose their ideas, and draw the reader through the story as if by way of treasure map. By the time I had figured out where the X was on Malcolm’s map, I was only twenty pages in – but still, the book didn’t get boring, and that’s all about presentation.

The third brain buster was the shear weight of information. From the beginning of the first chapter, where Gladwell dissects the birthdays of hockey players, right up to the last few pages where he tells the story of a Jamaican woman who moved to Britain for love of knowledge (arguably the best story in the book), the statistical density is high. It speaks to the power of Gladwell’s writing, as well, that this barely becomes overwhelming, and that it’s so understandable.

The one that really baked my noodle, however, and that’s changed my life approach in certain respects, was one really simple idea, the one that takes a page to explain, but requires Gladwell to make universally accessible: Your personal history, everything from the beginning of the universe until now that went into the making of the You that you are, provides you with the infinite capacity for wealth, success, the realization of all your dreams, and total, utter fulfilment in whatever flavour you can conjure. It requires only that you identify where you need to be for your highest good, and that you act on that highest good without hesitation, without compromise, and without any thought to how much work you’ll need to do.

There really is no such thing as an overnight success, but you can become one, if you find your highest good and work yourself to every bone you’ve got to get there. Because once you’re there, you can change the world – not just for yourself, but if you do it right and well, for everyone after you.

The people, places and organizations Gladwell has studied in this book: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Chris Langan, Joe Flom, the city of Harlan, Kentucky, Korean Air, rice paddy farmers in China, and these are just a sample. These people, places and organizations build on each other toward that inevitable truth. Your hard work is not enough to make you an outlier. But your hard work at something your entire chronology an ecology have uniquely prepared you for can shift the very earth you walk on and turn your touch to a golden blessing – if you do it right.

By the time Gladwell tells the story of Daisy Nation and her twin daughters in the final chapter, he has taught an entirely new world view, one that prepares the reader to receive the story, which he relates in a very flat, biographical way for portions, with the light of the Outlier on it, and make unwritten connections proving the concept in a beautiful manner.

I would buy this book again. I’d buy it for friends. I’d buy it for you, if you haven’t read it (if I had the cash to spare) – or I’ll lend you mine if you’re in town and can convince me it’ll make its way back to me in one piece. Or, if you want, you can also go buy yourself a copy here because this is definitely a book that’s worth having, and coming back to again whenever you’re feeling downtrodden on the road to success.

Photo by me!

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: book review, books, commentary, malcolm gladwell, outliers, overnight success

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