The Communications Rainbow

What is it?

The Victorians were obsession with classification. Our modern industrial world was built on a simple, pragmatic thought - that to classify, was to understand. Darwin, Edison, Livingstone - all took journeys armed with this simple belief.

The "Communications Rainbow" is homage to that era. A simple, visual, classification of marketing.

What does it do?

The rainbow tries to put tactics (2nd ring in) into perspective - I've often frustrated by the small amount of time, money and effort allocated to digital thinking. To online planning. To making sure, money spent, is spent wisely. By demonstrating the layers of thinking on which the outer, tactical rings should be based, I wanted a tool to illustrate to clients, just how important having a business, marketing and brand strategy was - before they started to think about "marketing" as an ongoing task within an organisation.

In visually describing the huge variety and choice we have when trying to engage users, the rainbow also aims to be a tool to expand client horizons at the tactical stage. Listening and engagement, data web marketing, sCRM, content strategy - these areas of new marketing are all too often still nice to haves - in an always on world - they need to be placed at the heart of a marketing mix. Conversely, the ring of "products" acts as a mind map of the kinds of products and services, marketing agencies might think of offering in the new world.

To my mind, many digital agencies need to move out of their "lick and stick", "design it, built it" mentality - and understand that they need to offer (and clients are crying out for) a more consultancy style approach. One which offers a broader suite of training and consultancy products -as well as the "practical web" stuff.

Away from tactics, I wanted a tool to help place digital marketing in a wider marketing and business context. Marketing is the interface between the business and the user. Done right, it must have the opportunity to inform product design, IT, PR and HR. This can't be just a nice to have - it is essential in a conversational, always on world - where users expect their feedback and interaction to mean something.

Next steps....


The Communication Rainbow is a starter for 10. A personal take on the world, full of my own prejudices and blind spots. I would love others to contribute to it. I hope to have an interactive version of it soon, which will allow other planners, and marketeers, to add to it. There is much that needs to be improved. It nevertheless represents a start, something to which I hope, others will want to contribute.

On that note - I need to thank Joe Crump, at Razorfish, who has kindly allowed me to use a part of his excellent Digital Darwinism slides here in the filters section.

 

a perfect summation of the marketing industry....

API's - an engagement tool

API’s – or application programming interfaces – are a critical part of the digital world.

Without them, developers would be unable to use other people’s data in their own applications and widgets.

When you use a weather application on your iPhone – its getting its information through an API. When you see your pictures from flickr in a widget on facebook – the widget is pulling those images from your flickr account via its API. When you see a google map with information about the victims of an earthquake plotted on it – you get the idea….

From a planning and marketing perspective this technology is incredibly exciting. A brand with an API is automatically social, accessible, human. The implications of having one ripple through the business and affect all manner of systems and processes for the better. Information is set free. People inside and outside of the organisation suddenly have a reason to talk to each other. Users engage and communicate with the brand in amazing new ways. APIs are the best weapon a planner has in his / her armory to deepen engagement. And best of all, from the brands point of view. They mean everyone else does the heavy lifting of application development.

So it was with some excitement this morning that we got an email from a client to say the work we’ve been doing with them to introduce them to the delights of “pull” marketing has paid off – and they’re now thinking of building one. The client, apart from being one of our most forward thinking, is particularly interesting because the data they hold concerns stuff people really care about. On some level, everyone in the UK is interested in the data that this client holds and because of this – where its seeds will spread – is anyone’s guess.

pushing the stupid kid...

I was having a conversation with an acquaintance recently. He is a fairly senior exec at a big ad agency.

Reminded me of a piece I'd seen here

At one point in the conversation he said "I can tell the people who walk into any supermarket to buy whatever I want"

I said that didn't apply to me, and he agreed - but pointed out that there are a lot more stupid people in the world that bright ones.

On a practial level he's correct - 50% of the population have an IQ under 100. Nearly 20% of the population are classified as retarded (with an IQ under 80). The population is also probably getting more stupid, due to a dysgenic effect. See Bell Curve for a brilliant (if controversial) disection of IQ here.

If the acquaintance is right. That IQ affects an individuals susceptibility to marketing - then it all starts to feel a little uncomfortable. Does for instance, the 15% of the internet population who click on banners simply represent all the stupid people online?

Religion, Darwin and the speed of change for brands online

The cynic in me is hearing the words but barely able to believe it. Bush has to NATIONALIZE a financial institution - WTF???

The US state. The home of the "free" market whose central tenant is the belief the market can solve all ills has to nationalize a bank.

Tee, hee....

Anyway, we digress.

Driving away from one of the most bone crushingly awful christenings I've yet to have the displeasure of attending. Complete with music on CD introduction and a call to renounce the devil (for thoughts on organised religion Richard Dawkins pretty much covers it here.) a random and wandering thought struck me.

Does the relative speed at which the religion "brand" blew up, have any implications for the online world today?

Premise 1: Organized religion is a brand. Not a new idea, but one that bears repeating. In a nutshell - a lot of people spent a lot of money (and time, nearly 2000 years) associating the image of a cross with meaning to convince people to swap their hard earned cash for forgiveness.

Premise 2: Religion brand was chugging along very nicely for most of its 2000 year period, "saving" souls and generally doing (cough) good works - and making a tidy pile of $$ by the by, when a young, biologist called Darwin (or rather Spencer - lets not go there) pulls the pieces of a very ancient jigsaw puzzle together and points out (in the absence on Mendelian genetics - which in itself is extraordinary) that it looks very much like a gradual evolution of species might have occurred, and this could possibly have taken place without "you know who" - with the beard - upstairs.

Premise 3: Religion brand, within the space of 200 years (10% of its overall lifetime) collapses. Almost overnight organized god bothering goes into terminal decline and is reduced to absurd, toe curlingly embarrassing rituals like the one I just attended.

The relative speed with which the wheels came off the religious brand cart is in itself surprising.

Even more interesting. As the wheels flew off, the disintegration process seems to have accelerated. Can we learn anything from this?

For as long as modern brands have been around we (brand) tell you (the consumer) what messages and concepts to associate with our name.

But now, and only just very recently, that concept has been turned on its head. Now we (consumers) are telling you (brand) what messages and concepts we'll associate with your brand. We’ll let you participate in the conversation, you can direct and suggest, but ultimately we're going to make the decision.

My sense is that we're reaching a tipping point. A point where ideas of community, free thinking and participation that were bubbling in the online world for 15 years, start to coalesce and take shape.

The birth of the Internet was the Darwin moment for brands where overnight, the status quo blew up. In relative terms then brands might need to change very fast, very soon.

Of course large, abrupt change isn't always welcome. If we draw on another 18th century political theorists Edmund Burke would be worried. He was all about gradual change. Darwin could be seen to harness some of his thoughts in his own theory. For Burke only gradual, non cataclysmic, calm, measured change would do.

Are more turbulent times around the corner for brands?

Feels like it and I guess at heart I'm with Edmund, that's probably why I am so fascinated by what is happening with them online and why I probably shouldn't be laughing as Bush Nationalizes banks.....

listening not speaking

14 years ago, as a young record company exec I tried to convince my MD we should build a website. It was hard, there was no obvious reason for it.

Pretty soon everyone needed a website to tell a global audience about themselves.

14 years on and with (most) of the world understanding the basic utlity of a website the game has moved on.

The web isn't about telling people anything. Users of your product or service can very well find out the warts and all story about you, far quicker and more easily than you could, or should provide it. The game is now about listening to what people are saying about you. Shaping your brand around the the conversations you and they create.

In many ways, this (web 2.0 for want of a better way of describing it) is a much harder sell than 14 years ago. A website is a mouth piece. An electronic billboard. Nothing more. Listening to your customers often involves the reinvention of a business model. Profound change in pretty much every department of a business, from HR through to product development. In tough economic times many large household names could become extinct in the next 5 years.

Early adopter brands and companies who have twigged this of course are already stealing a march on their competition - see Dell, LG and Avis for some impressive growth figures even in a difficult economy.

Are Avis or Dell's products really that much better than the competition? - or are people starting to base their purchasing decisions on the views of an online audience and their own perception of how a brand seems to care about its customers?

I own a Dell computer and walk past an Avis forecourt with an Aston to hire every morning - I know what I believe.

I wonder how long it'll take to convince the rest of the online world to start listening....

what we mean by a global village

On from yesterdays post...

One of the most thought provoking pieces of writing on the web is by the late, great Douglas Adams. Read the whole piece here

The 2nd to last paragraph I love..

"We are natural villagers. For most of mankind's history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing."

More quickly than anyone really imagined, humankind is rediscovering, via technology, the ability to reconnect with itself. It is this phenomenon that is at the heart of the connected world.

To put the concept in context.....Within your village 250 years ago you would have known the business of most people. You'd have known who was sleeping with who, who brewed the best beer, which baker added sawdust to their bread and who slacked off at harvest time.

What digital technology has done is recreate this world, or at least, recreate the mechanics of it. To amplify human bonds, to make us feel, at least partially, more connected to everyone else, the world around us and ourselves.

For 250 years, as we've burned hydrocarbons and industrialized, the importance of these connections was downplayed, even considered "dated". Instead we learned to rely on 3rd parties - to trust businesses we had no personal connection with, to informed us as to the best products and services. We no longer knew who brewed the best beer. Advertising was born. We got to the stage where our sense of self became so caught up in these messages, many of us lost our identities. We became, in Marxist language, "alienated".

As people thinking about how to engage other people in the digital world, this concept, that we are "natural villagers" should be at the heart of our thinking. Only by recreating and harnessing the inbuilt desire to connect can we be effective - and more importantly, can be build brands who can usefully serve us again.

the dove "make over" viral

Its been around for ages and talked about at length, but in a meeting this morning the dove "make over" viral was mentioned and we took 3 minutes to watch it again. If you've not seen it already the clip is here

Every time I watch this I'm blown away by it.

In its simplicity and execution it educates, informs and entertains the viewer - I am more likely to buy a dove product because of this.

The clip is everything inbound marketing should be - forget finding your audience as a PR, there are too many people to keep a track of and in touch with. instead rely on your ingenuity and creativity to come up with a brilliant idea and let an audience find you.

"no logo"....more like "all logo"

Really interesting piece here .

In short - most consumers make choices burdened by asymmetries of information. i.e. they aren't able to make truly rational purchase decisions because they are not in possession of all the facts.

But of course that is changing.

Within 5 years, a customers ability to instantly access reliable data on how a product or service performs - will mean the age of pulling a fast one on your customers is over. Only total honesty, total openness will suffice - or to put it another way - the consumers' cynicism about what they're being told in ads will be complete.

All this means of course within a very short space of time the concept of marketing itself will be radically different - it will no longer be an activity associated with convincing people to buy stuff.

The role of public relations will be as important as ever - marketing on the other hand will become a business activity - pushing a brands identity into ever more creative and interesting activities - to augment the perception of the core product/s.

This in itself will drive the next phase of globalisation as mega brands coalesce around whole sectors whose product and activities support each other.

But what is really interesting - what is really going to change the face of our society forever - is brands becoming the true guardians of our ecological, social and political aspirations.

It will be brands, not politicians or NGO's who will become the catalysts to a fairer, more sane, calmer world.

Brands will defend our rights. They will champion ever more serious causes. They will migrate closer and closer to the social, economic and political heart of our culture. Within 10 years we may well have politicians having their salaries and expenses paid for, by brands.

No logo....more like all logo.

Getting our heads round the digital channel - corporate incongruence

From experience way less than 50% of businesses are truly engaging in what we might call web 2.0.

Many are struggling with 1.0 and its hardly surprising. What the hell is a folksonomy? And more to the point, how the hell is knowing what one is, going to help me sell more wigits next quarter?

The web landscape is changing so rapidly that even as someone who makes it their business to be informed, I'm faced, pretty much daily, with a new bit of technology or concept I need to get my head round - its bewildering and scary. A lot of senior marketeers appear to be getting left behind.

There are brands, who, like annoying younger siblings, seem to be at ease with the web - Avis, HP, Dell. So what are these companies doing that others aren't?

Well, for one, they've realised the need to re-engineer pretty much their entire corporate structure to take account of what their customers want. They are listening like never before - and that takes courage and time.

A brand I was talking to a couple of weeks ago was convinced that they wanted to talk about being green. I showed them online where people were screeming at them that the environmentally friendly options on their products were buried deep in the menu structure of their machines. They weren't being congruent. Their corporate body was saying one thing but the body language was saying another.

If you're a senior marketeer who wants a daily 5 minute tutorial on the web and how you can use it. I hope you bookmark my blog.