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The Power of Dumb Ideas
by Randall Rothenberg
09/29/05
The solution to marketing's current ills is not more creativity. It's less.
This will be the dumbest riff on marketing you will ever read. If you're
lucky.
Marketing is overwhelmed by complexity, and marketers' predisposition toward
creativity only complicates their job, their companies' operations, and
their own lives even more.
Ten years ago, the challenges were merely:
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* the advance of the five-hundred-channel universe
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* reconciling the historic tensions between marketing and sales
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* calculating the return on advertising investment
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* keeping abreast of fickle public taste
Today, a quick look at Google indicates that we're grappling with an
eight-billion-channel world. The distinction between marketing and sales has
evaporated in the face of direct-marketing technologies that brand products,
take orders, and fulfill them at the same time.
Even worse, there is no more public taste. There are only publics' tastes,
which are ever more atomized, specific, and hard to fathom.
David Ogilvy's contention that "it takes a big idea to attract the attention
of consumers and get them to buy your product" no longer applies. His fellow
advertising guru Bill Bernbach's belief that, in marketing, "not to be
different is virtually suicidal" today may be suicidal in and of itself.
The solution to marketing's current ills is not more creativity. It's less.
Novelty for the sake of novelty is not only risky, it's more often than not
a recipe for irrelevance. A study of 1,300 publicly traded U.S. companies in
fifty-five industries by Chuck Lucier, senior vice president emeritus at
Booz Allen Hamilton, found that only four broad ideas, copied over and over
again in one sector after another, accounted for 80 percent of the breakout
businesses created between 1965 and 1995: power retailing, megabranding,
focus/simplify/standardize, and the value chain bypass. True, the big-box
store may not be the most original concept on Earth - which is exactly the
point! Originality hasn't mattered a whit to the customers, employees, and
shareholders who have enjoyed its application in consumer electronics
(Circuit City), home improvement (Home Depot), and office supplies
(Staples).
So what is the simple, dumb truth?
Imitation Across Industries Is More Efficient and Effective Than Blue-Sky
Creativity and Innovation. If you accept that one million monkeys pounding
on keyboards for one thousand years will eventually, accidentally produce a
ton of gibberish and one Shakespearean sonnet, you must also accept the
converse: that a lone creative individual racking her brain will produce
much less gibberish, and nothing profound. Appropriating existing marketing
concepts is cheaper - and certainly quicker to implement - than developing
new ones. The secret is bringing a great idea from another market or
industry to your market or industry.
The Energy Isn't in the Idea; it's in the Execution. Every manager, from the
middle on up, knows that the secret to success lies not in strategy, but in
galvanizing a team to implement the strategy. Lucier's research on breakout
businesses also showed that the winning companies in each market were those
that put together a winning business system around the unoriginal ideas. The
hard work of marketing lies not in developing a groundbreaking product or
the communications scheme for it, but in coordinating the efforts of R&D,
manufacturing, finance, communications, sales, or some set of subunits. Do
this once, and you've created a cross-functional team that knows how to do
it over and over again, and whose enthusiasm itself communicates volumes.
You Must Create True Believers Before You Can Win New Converts. I once asked
the president of a major U.S. auto company whether any studies had been done
to determine which factors distinguished superior salespeople from average
salespeople. He responded that the only research he'd ever seen found no
differences in age, education, sex, race, or family background, but did
reveal one distinct variable: the number of times the individual went back
and attempted to close the sale. Faith in yourself and in your colleagues is
a necessary predisposition for marketers; the best ones convey that faith
outward, eventually subsuming their customers and clients. The most powerful
marketing ideas create and reinforce that kind of faith.
It's Your Context That Counts. The big idea doesn't have to be the brand-new
idea. Something common to the word at large may be very new to you and your
organization. This is more than enough to galvanize the team, create faith,
and build the world's greatest marketing department.
source:
www.strategy-business.com/press/enewsarticle/enews092905?pg=all