Working with top companies worldwide in all major sectors
for 20 years, I’ve discovered that few of them come even close
to achieving their potential results.
A key reason is that their leaders “don’t know that they
don’t know”.
They don’t know that marketing as we know it has come to
an end. A more successful growth-dynamic must replace it. That
dynamic is tied to human emotions and the results-producing
actions those emotions trigger.
No question: Emotion is a critical driver in business
success. Clearly, people in business have to be skilled and
knowledgeable about products, processes, and customers. But
simply having rational knowledge is not enough to get big
increases in results. We must have emotional knowledge too.
A fundamental truth of human motivation is that we define
ourselves in terms of our emotions. Descartes didn't quite
have it right: it's not, "I think therefore I am; it's really,
"I feel therefore I am".
Yet most marketing strategies and programs focus on the
rational — market share, target identification and validation,
and customer needs analysis — and ignore the emotional. In
doing so, such strategies ignore great opportunities.
To achieve quantum leaps in results that most businesses
are capable of, “the end of marketing” must be recognized.
Conventional marketing served companies in relatively
stable economies when businesses were like large ships, with
captains giving orders to the mates, the mates to crews. But
today businesses are in white-water canoeing races.
In rapidly changing markets, exclusively rational marketing
can't compete well.
What will replace marketing? To answer that, let's
understand what marketing is all about. It's about one thing,
organizational growth. Such growth happens through strategy
and action.
Today's marketing activities are superficially linked
to strategy and have little to do with action. The result:
businesses rattle along not hitting on all cylinders.
Strategy: We grow in business or ultimately die. So it
behooves each business to have a strategy for growth.
We might develop a growth strategy. It might seem
convincing on paper. It might interest security analysts.
It might brighten an annual report. But unless employees and
customers alike believe it passionately, wake up in the morning
motivated by it, spend each day exciting others about it, see
it as a key stimulant of their life, and zealously realize it
in their work activities, then it is merely a recitation of
dry postulates. It can only realize partial results.
When strategies resonate with people's heartfelt needs,
great things happen. History is replete with such strategies:
Themistocles' naval strategy for defeating the Persians; the
Pilgrim's strategy of attaining religious freedom by building
a “city on the hill” in the New World; Jefferson's strategy
for realizing an America bounded by the Atlantic and Pacific;
America’s strategy for putting a man on the moon before the
end of the 1960s, etc.
And the history of business has its examples too: Ford
Motor Company of the first decades of this century; IBM of the
1950s, Apple of the early 1980s, Wall-Mart of the 1990s, Dell
of the past few years.
There are three ways to get a motivational growth-strategy.
First, link it to what people feel strongly about.
Many leaders wrongly believe that just because they have
taken the trouble to develop a marketing strategy, that strategy
automatically excites others.
If you don't root your strategy in the fervent convictions
of employees and customers, you don't have a motivational
growth-strategy.
Steve Jobs' strategy for providing bringing a powerful,
versatile computer into the hands of average people around the
world, fired the imaginations and the ardent actions of his
colleagues and, ultimately, customers.
Second, raise the stakes. Follow Emerson's dictum:
"Hitch your wagon to a star." Distinguish between vision and
motivational growth-strategy. A vision is the star. The
strategy is how you will hitch your wagon to it. When people's
vision and strategy provide a higher purpose in their lives,
their motivation is of a higher order.
Jobs convinced John Scully to leave a high-level, fast-track
position at PepsiCo and commit himself to the uncertainties of
working at Apple by asking: "Do you want to sell sugar water
for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?"
Third, make the strategy simple and short. Growth can be
complicated, but people's needs are simple.
Bill Gates wrote a strategy in longhand on a single sheet
of paper when he founded Microsoft. He still has possession of
that paper and is still following that strategy.
The processes of putting that strategy into action may take
comprehensive descriptions. Still, those descriptions should
flow from simple, brief motivational elements.
Action: Motivational growth-strategies aren't plans,
they're action. Without people taking action, results can't
happen.
Rational marketing stumbles because leaders often view such
marketing as some kind of magic dust that, sprinkled out, changes
behavior. But only motivated people change their behavior.
In trying to realize marketing plans, top leaders often
get jammed up in middle-manager meatgrinders. Those leaders
can usually persuade their direct reports to participate in
the changes.
However, the far more important task is to persuade
middle-managers to lead change. Because traditional marketing
ignores the emotional needs of middle-managers, needs that
frequently illuminate ways to increase results, those managers
can and will make mincemeat of even the best-intended, rationally
consistent, and brilliantly-conceived marketing strategy.
Hey, this isn’t black hole physics! Getting results is
simply about strategy and action: making a simple, powerful
motivational growth-strategy happen in the many, little actions
taken daily by skilled, motivated people.
Because motivational growth-strategies flow out of the
hearts of people, rather than rain down from above, those
strategies get those people championing actions that get big
results.
The end of marketing is the beginning of success that can
only now be dimly imagined.
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2004 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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