The Strategy Review

The "distributed me" and the personal impact of surveillance

Prompted by the quite astounding - you couldn't make this stuff up - report from the BBC today regarding The Home Office's apparent "collusion" with Phorm, to think and post some more about this issue of privacy and trust, into which a number of hitherto unrelated threads are converging.

Our recent postings on these diverse concerns are here, here and here.

The Home Secretary was yesterday reported as demanding new laws to match new communications realities.

"Communications data is an essential tool for law enforcement agencies to track murderers, paedophiles, save lives and tackle crime," Ms Smith said. "Advances in communications mean that there are ever more sophisticated ways to communicate and we need to ensure that we keep up with the technology being used by those who seek to do us harm."

Well, hmmm. OK.

But I want to make a different - I believe both more subtle and more powerful point here.

Accepted - with some reservations - that law seeks to meet criminals with comparably sophisticated resources. Sounds alarmingly similar to the "big gun > bigger gun > biggest gun" escalation we've seen in the past, an argument that we'll lose if we can't outgun the bad guys. However ...

A cultural and social change that connectness brings, that is given little coverage, is the fact that, just as networks and rich-featured mobile extend my reach and range in terms of communication, they also carry my very Identity out into this world that The Home Office sees as so hostile.

Pre-Web Smiley-styley spy games - and the various forms of surveillance they entailed - largely stopped short of invading citizens' personal space. Today when say BT stores details of my usage of Facebook, LinkedIn and my various email accounts and web surfing (I have to say I just don't trust that this much-protested "contact not content" stance is entirely honest), my new "distributed self", as opposed to the one that pre-connectedness was more or less confined to my own physical body, my usage of the Royal Mail and the odd (Bakelite) phone call, is very tangibly recorded.

Just as the medium is the message, surely the contact to a significant extent, IS the content.

My experience of being human is transformed, highly distributed, across both space and time through connectedness. With or without the obfuscation and dissembling we're so weary of, just because these kind folks are not (yet) kicking our doors in doesn't mean they're not, in a very real sense, inside our heads.

If the future isn't digital ... what is it? (Part 4)

BUSINESS NEEDS TO MOVE BEYOND INFORMATION

Knowledge management

The dream of knowledge management has always been - implicitly or less so - to encode and leverage the experience of an organisation's most "knowledgeable", expert, valuable, irreplaceable people.

In reality, the most valuable knowledge of all (partly due to the difficulty of capture and even more difficult, encoding…) is that which in many ways implicit rather than explicit.

The most powerful information is in fact almost impossible to encode, and is therefore impossible to communicate and exploit.

This is critical, and not just for knowledge management professionals. As we can see above, the workplace reality creates a value blockage, in that the knowledge - perhaps we can call this information for greater clarity - that such systems are best equipped to handle is typically far less valuable, far more common and commoditised - albeit easy to encode and share - than that which would promote substantial advantage.

So, most knowledge management systems end up as archives, document management….lots of lip service paid, but more or less ignored in real day-to-day practice. The good stuff is personal, and social in nature. What we really need access to is not information – it’s experience, expertise and assurance. These we get from people.

Knowledge, for all practical purposes, is tribal.

CRM

The tainted dream of Customer Relationship Management, was that the capture and encoding of information about the behaviour of people would enable corporations (like giant, clumsy Geishas perhaps?) to anticipate their future behaviour, in particular their purchasing dispositions, in order to take best commercial advantage.

But as we saw with knowledge management, the most valuable information that a company could wish to own about a customer is private,  and increasingly at the time of writing, jealously guarded, by the high-value customer in particular.

And correspondingly, the most powerful experiences that a customer may have shared with the business (or more commonly its representatives) are almost purely emotive. They can be told – as stories, if you like – but they are not usefully susceptible to encoding as knowledge. They cannot be meaningfully exploited.

How many meaningless - yet perfectly, from the direct marketing point of view, targeted, and in many instances well-intentioned - commercial communications do we still receive across all channels? Literally thousands each year?

What does this mean for business and its relationship with information?

There is value, there is meaning, there are powerful, loyal relationships, there is even commercial benefit. They're out there, by the ton. But none of this dazzling opportunity - not one ounce - can be manipulated as "information", or "knowledge", simply because it is not, except in the broadest, far too forgiving sense, susceptible to encoding. Information, at best, just points at it.

Clearly this has considerable implications for the role and value of information in today's and tomorrow's worlds.

But weren't we always just a little suspicious - less than 100% convinced, but never able to satisfactorily articulate our concerns - of the supposedly explosive and infinite value that "all that access to all that information" would actually turn out to represent?

Tribes and Trust - iTrust

Is there an endgame for business, information and the customer relationship?

Come through the Looking Glass with me, into the near-future … Meet Yasmin. The mobile in her hand has become a wand of remarkable range and power. Picture her browsing in a supermarket in the near future, perhaps helping out Mum by doing the family shop on a Friday evening before going out with friends.

Her phone (which is now connected to an always-on, high-bandwidth network) has a relatively simple set of features that enable it to read RFID tags and barcodes: in other words, to collect, organise and display information about any item for sale. As she trawls the aisles, before selecting any item for her basket, she checks the colour display of the phone.

If she gets a red light, for “stop”, the product goes back on the shelf and an alternative brand may be considered; if amber, for “wait”, she can either take the product, replace it, or request another level of information to be instantly sent to the display. If a green light appears, she selects the product without further hesitation. This process, far from increasing the time required for the shopping, often shortens it.

How is that? And what do the lights mean?

Yasmin’s family are shareholders in the biggest brand in the world, iTrust (“Where Responsible Business Meets the World”).

The service, a global organisation which has a still-growing global user-base of say 20,000,000 families and individuals, paying between €100 (or $100) and €300 (or $300 per year) as equal shareholders for access, has one simple proposition: it enables shoppers for any product or service to ensure that the corporation that owns the brand meets their own articulated individual trust standards.

It is an electronic trust service, or rather, THE electronic trust service. And its annual turnover is currently $4,000,000,000.

The biggest brand in the world, in the hands of 20,000,000 individuals.

The impact of iTrust?

Simple. Shoppers are empowered, with every purchase they make, to vote with their wallets for or against the commercial success of every corporation in the world.

Supported by the auditing and benchmarking capabilities of NGO’s, each one handling a different element of corporate trust, environment, food quality, accounting, welfare and so on, consumers simply select the values and standards they wish to reflect and support in all their purchases, configuring iTrust to automatically exclude or query those brands that fall below the appropriate benchmarks.

A number of services cluster around the core proposition, and more are added each year.

Yasmin’s family, for example, have configured the service to refer in real time to the various databases that carry their individual medical records – including all mild or severe food allergies and current medications, their health targets, the monthly budgets for groceries, entertainment and so on, the household diary, their travel and social plans. 

Critically, the service also extends its trust services to offer a secure “infomediary” feature, thus acting as a smart representative for its shareholders that protects their anonymity against the hostile CRM softwares of the corporations.

iTrust is, unsurprisingly, uniquely equipped and positioned to enable its shareholders to connect with each other to form active, focused communities, networks of  concern and conscience.
These groups form a further ring of influence and feedback for the iTrust system, as well as of course fundamentally impacting the way the participants experience and use the process of consumption. They often issue bulletins that alert contributors to the ethical or corrupt behaviour of the corporations they watch. Recommendations to buy are hardly less frequent than rallying cries to boycott.

Science fiction or fork in the road?

How far are we now – technically, attitudinally – from  a reality featuring iTrust? Not that far. And note how the immense power of the network, combined with the decline in shared meaning, has sown all the seeds that were needed.

If the future isn't digital ... what is it? (Part 3)

INFORMATION AND THE LOSS OF MEANING

‘One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it … A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’
                                                        Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 1, 114-115

How information dilutes human relationships

Up to a century and a half ago, the delivery of a letter from say Edinburgh to London involved a series of quite dangerous – and one assumes costly – horseback rides to place a communication that might have today done quite nicely as a brief email, even an SMS message, in the hands of the recipient.

No fresh insight here at first glance, but linger for a moment more. How much more significant, momentous and risky (and therefore flattering) this process is for both author and recipient. The sheer physical work required, the time spent, the hours of waiting, talk up the nature of the relationship, the importance of the matter in hand, the weightiness of each scribbled word.

There is meaning here that does not derive from the communication itself, but from the means, the process of communication. Something powerful is said and taken on board before the message is even opened.

This is a clear form of long distance tribal grooming, a statement about esteem and hierarchy, a social act as much as an informational one. The importance, the seriousness of our communications are expressed and underlined by the means of transmission, and the amount of work, risk and cost involved.

Thus the ever-increasing ease of access we experience today creates an interesting gap. While the benefits of such enablement are undoubted, something is lost.

More simply put, when I can say it to you anyhow, anytime and anywhere, the ease of expression, this lack of friction and endeavour, can compromise the social component of my communication to you. How important is it?

And more crucially, how important is our relationship? If all human communication is, as has been convincingly proposed, evolved from the grooming behaviour we still observe in monkeys, where the very effort and sacrifice, the spent energy required to perform this central service to the individual and the tribe, are part and parcel of the message itself, what is said?

What, in fact is there left to say, when the process becomes effortless. Does it then become meaningless?

What happens to our human experience when we habitually have access to mobile phones, Internet, endless data, and of course, each other?

We rapidly discover that, if a little connection was a dangerous thing, a lot is highly corrosive. Far from improving our lot, the depth and quality of relationships of all kinds are profoundly compromised by the new ease of access.

How information attacks meaning

Belief used to be easy to come by: information was tougher. Knowledge in the Dark Ages was built upon belief, and used in that context exclusively. (To do otherwise was considered heresy.) The monasteries were the repositories of all knowledge, the dispensaries for all information.

The mechanism of print was what began to break the hold that belief had over knowledge. Information could, in a very simple mechanical way at first, be duplicated.

Why was print so powerful and why does Caxton's hand-cranked press stack up so perfectly against the most advanced digital cool tool?

Because that very encoding facilitates the creation and distribution of knowledge, unhooks it from its latency.

And here's something else.

When that latency is exploited commercially, when knowledge is, via information technologies, everywhere as it is now, it becomes, having once been a bona fide mystery, a jewel of Promethean importance, whose very rarity made it a treasure … merely boring. In commercial terms, it becomes a commodity.

Yet we are still superstitiously resistant to this realisation. Consider this. The parents of my generation, who mostly grew up during or just after the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and all of whom were affected by the Second World War, are indelibly marked by their experiences. Ideas that may be important to them - central credo's, in fact - are often difficult for their offspring to understand today.

I’m thinking here in particular of the frugality ingrained first by economic crisis, and later by severe food shortages and rationing. We must respect their attitudes, and indeed the underlying principle of frugality is sound here, but we cannot of course live by them, if they are no longer relevant. (Sadly, they remain powerfully relevant in too many parts of the world.)

Similarly, the instinctive, but I argue redundant, notion that information, in and of itself, is valuable and worthy, is perhaps the ghost of the knowledge famine of the Middle Ages. The idea of its scarcity, inherited and held over (the firm grip sustained by the memory of “just how bad it was”), promotes a tangible but unspoken sense of value, a sort of mirage of opportunity.

Do I mean that learning is unimportant? Not at all. I mean that the hoarding, the fervid exploitation as information, of this new commodity is a complete red herring.

Security is so yesterday

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

The other night I attended a dinner at which we heard brief presentations of their research from a number of ambitious computer scientists. A lot of interesting work is clearly being done on enhancing graphics and on modeling biological systems. The presentation that most struck me, though, was one from a Dr Capra, part of whose work is focused on how the information collectively generated by remote and mobile devices can be used to increase the efficiency of real time decision making.

Very briefly, it is increasingly the case that the content of mobile communications and the information from RFID tags can help us adjust our plans before we encounter the problem, or opportunity, that would compel us to adjust them anyway. Thus if a tube station is out of action or the supermarket is out of Rye bread we could, with the right systems, glean that information before we set out, and without Transport for London or Tesco having to broadcast it. Broadcast would require indiscriminate information provision and create huge problems of relevance and search; whereas the pull model - leveraging what is already available - could, by contrast be highly efficient. The problem is to know what information to trust, or how much of it is required  to engender reasonable confidence.

At the time I only commented on how all of the research activity seems to be, in one way or another, about media, in the McLuhan sense of tools that enable us to manipulate the world. But afterwards what struck me most was the contrast between what Dr Capra described and the discussion around the table. The vision she presented is surely one of an increasingly self-organising society, and was totally at odds with the conversation about keeping information secure that was going on around me.

At the same time as, or perhaps because, trust drains away from institutions and comes to rest increasingly with peer groups, so this possibility of self-organising social systems is emerging. Viewed in that light, data security as we know it is a problem of institutions. In a society where the young are increasingly at home with multiple persona's, and  where protecting your privacy is tantamount to a refusal to participate in the dance of mutual self-affirmation, the only information that the individual needs to secure is that required of them by institutions. In a very real sense data security, an apparently huge problem, may in fact be only a fin de siècle challenge - one of transition.

Of course it's not as simple as that, and I am not naive enough to believe that a fully self-organising society which at the same time guarantees the safety and opportunity of all its members will emerge any time soon. But it is interesting to reflect that security and surveillance are, in a very real sense, about institutions fighting for their right to exist. The natural authority with which society once imbued them has gone - now they assert it through exactly these tools of control. I'm uncomfortable with that, more because it smacks of an authoritarianism that has not been publicly legitimised, than the way it impacts me on a daily basis. Security has become the modern manifestation of the divine right of kings.

If the future isn't digital ... what is it? (Part 2)

MEANING AND THE EXPERIENCE OF BRAND

‘The hour’s now come;
The very minute bids thee ope thine ear.
Obey, and be attentive. Canst thou remember
A time before we came unto this cell?’
        Prospero to Miranda, The Tempest, 1.2

A Tesco epiphany - Energy and Entropy

The scientists call it entropy. It means an inevitable pull from order to chaos, or a loss of energy.
Entropy is what I experience when a politician makes another promise, when I’m on hold with a mobile phone operator’s call centre, when I read any annual report, or when my kids demand chocolate cereal for breakfast. And about another 2,500 times a week. It’s a panicky sinking of the heart, a draining of energy.

What about “brand energy”? Five years ago, Tesco and the rest were into their stride with loyalty cards. Clearly, no matter how much data they collected, it made no difference to them, and none to my experience. They were more or less paying me to shop with them, and I was busy collecting my points.

Late on a Thursday I was finally at the checkout, exhausted, cranky, trolley packed with a week’s worth. My cashier was a tiny Asian girl, hugely pregnant, equally weary. I’d forgotten – disaster! – the bloody milk, which, this being a super-mega store, was 200 yards away. I grunted this despairingly to her, and a rare brand epiphany unfolded …

Building meaning

She – angel of light – hopped hefalump-like off her seat and exclaimed: ‘I can get it for you!’ I insisted no, she must sit down again. We sent someone else off for the milk. We basked briefly in our new feeling of connection and goodwill.

I don’t need to say more, do I? This tiny (massive) event did more for my jaundiced bond with the Tesco brand than ANY OTHER EXPERIENCE with the brand I’d had. What exactly did that girl do? I’ve thought about it ever since. She built Meaning. She built, to be precise, what I call a ‘platform of meaning’ between me and her brand, Tesco.

Most of what I experience however - service, communications or both - creates the sinking feeling of brand entropy. The already flimsy threads of meaning that connect me with the brand are further frayed, that familiar gap between the promised service and the delivered experience tells me again and again that, well … we just don’t understand one another at all.

Hopeless? I don’t happen to think so. I think that the people who lead these firms can take on this notion of “managing for meaning”. They can start by replacing that old silliness about missions and visions, with the construction of shared platforms of meaning.

Understanding Meaning

Meaning is treated here not as an attribute of information, but as a crucial part of human experience, a component of belonging, sharing, understanding, perceiving, associating, finding relevance, feeling inclusion and trust, seeing value, engagement, attitude, belief, acceptance, receptiveness, expectation, and often attraction and desire.

It’s the starting point, the platform, for most things good. Its absence or reduction precludes or undermines safety, understanding, organisation, trust, communication, leadership and management, compassion, identification, community, social structure, confidence and trade. And of course, enjoyment and fulfilment.

Meaning in 20th century culture

The nightmares that Franz Kafka articulates so uniquely, in works like The Castle, The Trial and Metamorphosis, are all defined and linked by their vacuum of meaning. Meaning has been surgically removed from his protagonists’ worlds. And look at the human experience that remains. Note that it is an obsession with information, manifested as an insane bastion of bureaucracy, that keeps meaning away.
The Gallic shrug that was existentialism was an attempt, by Camus, by Sartre and colleagues, to come to terms with, to make sense of, to create useful coordinates for, this same vacuum of meaning.

The terror evoked by Orwell’s 1984 is derived far more from the vacuum of meaning he describes, than from the comparatively cartoonish Room 101. And here information is used to do more than keep meaning at bay. In 1984, information, the currency of betrayal (surely the absolute reversal of shared meaning), is a killer.

How we experience meaning

Meaning seems at its root to be about connections: between individuals, between groups of individuals, and, also, within individuals, in that it can be experienced powerfully as new or better links between previously disconnected internal bits of us. A powerful sensation, this reduction in personal fragmentation. And of course, we also experience meaning as new or better connection between hitherto disparate ideas.

Meaning is, while rooted in the isolated experience of the individual, shared socially. What’s more, it seems to increase when shared, as we can see at a football match, or in a group therapy session. Whether energy or entropy, positive or negative ... both are accelerated, deepened, profoundly impacted by tribal connections. It can go well, it can go very badly.

We are understood, validated, a previous transaction or service encounter is remembered. We are heard, seen, acknowledged, our needs are intelligently anticipated. A spark of recognition is ignited unexpectedly. A feeling of increased personal or group energy marks new meaning.

Meaning is lost when you do one thing, having said another. When you fail to deliver on a promise. When you ask a question and turn your back on the answer. When you fail in authenticity. Most importantly perhaps, when you don’t listen, ignore, when you fail to respect. When you scorn, put down, render invisible the cares and concerns of other humans. We experience this as entropy. This loss of meaning, increasingly, is our experience of brands. Why can’t you just walk the talk, we ask.

So, what happens then when meaning is under attack? We lose ... almost everything worth having.

How we got here

The decay of Meaning is the culprit for an awful lot of the bewildering issues facing the human race, not merely commercial, but also political, environmental, social, emotional, spiritual and religious.

Why is this such a challenge now as opposed to earlier in history?

It’s information again, but information now massively distributed, pushed into every corner of our experience, by the new networks.

Dissonance, the direct experience of the little betrayals of which the world was always so forgiving (or at least ignorant), happens so rapidly, so tangibly today. Promises are made and visibly broken within a short period. Service expectations - ramped up most memorably by the Amazons spawned in e-commerce - are sky high.

We know so much more. And what we see is, so often, disappointing.

Information (as networks and data) both supplies the necessary platform for, and, with the evident reaching of its limitations, sets the stage for the next scene, an intense focus on meaning.

Another step back into the glorious past (and therefore into history)

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

Yesterday a Swedish court not only found four founder members of a file-sharing web site, The Pirate Bay, guilty of breaching copyright law, it sentenced them to jail. That came on top of an award for damages of £3 million. Never mind that the name was a red rag to the raging bull that is the collective recording industry, this case was important.

Among representatives of the industry delight is unconcealed. They are anxious to convey the impression that a decisive landmark has been achieved.  "There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that," said John Kennedy, chairman of industry body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

There is no doubt that, in this case, the rights of the entertainment companies were upheld and existing copyright laws vigorously asserted. Why then do I, perversely, see this as another nail in the coffin of the record companies and a setback for media industries in general.

There are three reasons why I hold this view. They range from the general, concerning all businesses affected by the the outcome of this case, to the particular, the recording companies themselves. 

The first has to do with copyright law itself. The music industry is not the only, or even the major, business sector affect by its provisions. Whatever the rights and wrongs of recent breaches, a general consensus seems to be emerging that, in its current form, the law (especially as it applies in the UK) is not fit for purpose. Not only is it increasingly hard to enforce, and thus falling increasingly into disrepute, there is a growing understanding that it might actually be reducing access to creative works - the precise opposite of the intention of the law - and inhibiting the commercial exploitation of those works. This "victory" will set back the campaign for its reform and give those, like the music industry, who see themselves as - by definition (theirs) -  the losers from any change, an argument for delay. The longer this drags on the greater the damage to wider interests, cultural as well as commercial.

The second concerns the interests of the broader music community. While the record companies have been suffering, much of the rest of the industry has been doing just fine - in fact many artists and their managers have been in clover. This is partly a consequence of more frequent concert appearances,  increased concert fees, and growth in the associated businesses like merchandising - benefits not unrelated to the added exposure that unconstrained dissemination of recordings delivers. It is also a result, I would argue, of a more general increase in access and opportunity for all, including newcomers. In fact the emerging business models in the industry are predicated on exposure - on as wide a dissemination as possible of the artists' work. In that sense what file sharing may take with one hand it returns at least twofold with the other. The idea that music should once again be corralled into tightly policed outlets, where access is controlled by the record companies, might sensibly be viewed with some horror by other players in the broader community.

And it isn't just about exposure. Since the means of distribution changed, music means something different to, and is used differently by, its audiences - who are also more active participants in the creative act. Turning the clock back (if that were possible) would necessarily change that as well, with - I can't help feeling - generally negative consequences for the artists and for musical creativity general.

The final reason, specific to the recording industry itself, is one I've harped on about before. It's not unhelpful to envisage the industry as split into two camps with, as you would expect, some in the middle who'd like to see a bit of both. The realists, who - until this setback - might have been gaining the upper hand, accept that everything has changed and that, as a consequence, the core business model must be revisited and new sources of revenue identified urgently. The other camp (I'm stuck for a non-pejorative name) believe that, essentially, nothing has changed except that the public - given the opportunity - has proven less law abiding than they had a right to expect. Impose the law properly and business as usual can be resumed.

Any change manager will tell you that successful change requires a 'burning issue', something all parties agree is so important it cannot be ignored, and that requires them to do something different to address it. Until yesterday that burning issue was becoming indisputable - historically reliable sources of revenue were under increasing threat and real changes in strategy were required to meet the challenge. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to realise that, once it can credibly be affirmed that all that is really needed is that the law be properly enforced, the flames are immediately doused. "It's them what needs to do their job, not us what needs to change" is likely to be the death knell of an industry that, by these standards deserves to die. The tides of history are sweeping in faster after yesterday - Canute may, perhaps contrary to his intentions, have manage to convince his courtiers that the waters can be held back, and so that defenses are not required.

The watchers - now watching each other

A less-than-reassuring move from the government, to rein in the local little Hitlers who've been - what a surprise - using the RIPA surveillance law and facilities to perform critical anti-terrorism and national security tasks. One excellent example is covert tracking for 3 weeks of a family wrongly suspected of declaring the wrong catchment area! Of course, we should have guessed that a loaded word like "catchment" would come into its own. And there are scores of doggy-poop and putting bins out on the wrong day applications as well. Ou sont les Winston Smiths d'antan?

Previous posts on this here and here.

If the future isn't digital ... what is it? (Part 1)

I've been mulling over this thought for a few days since an earlier post on the subject, and remembered some work I did for the interesting website Management Issues on The Age of Meaning.

To move this "what comes next" discussion forward, I'm going to produce here a abbreviated version - across a few chapters, of that rather long essay. (This seems - to my relief, as it originated several years ago now - to be an argument that is only turbo-charged by the more-than-sobering lessons of our current recession)

The core argument is that The Information Age is over: information in and of itself no longer provides value.

Those of us - and I feel a little exposed saying this - who find Twitter nothing more than the most recent and shrill manifestation of Rushdie's "blurt culture", feel increasingly that a little access to the means of (information) production and distribution is a very dangerous - indeed tiresome - thing.

And on the corporate/government side, as per my recent post on the dodgy data goings on, as well as David's post expressing concerns on privacy, and finally my earlier piece which precedes this one, on the collapse of the dream of digital revenues, digital, or more specifically, easy-access information, does seem to creating as many problems as it solves.

The Age of Meaning work argued essentially that information lays matters bare, to the degree that, at least from a corporate and commercial point of view, the two things that matter above all are Leadership and Branding.

Here's the opening salvo.

‘All hail, great master, grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure, be’t to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curled clouds; To thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality.’
            Ariel to Prospero, The Tempest, 1.2

The problem of direction

This is the end, not the beginning or middle, of the Information Age.

What comes next? It’s The Age of Meaning.

Information (as networks of data and connected people) has done its work. We need to move on, to build rapidly on what has been achieved, and to acknowledge where we have failed.

There is a new vagueness and uncertainty in the behaviour of the global corporations. A more frequent looking-over-of-shoulder. A loss of the common bravado. That’s because they’re no longer sure where they’re going. “Why do we matter?” is suddenly an important and far tougher question.

Everything that’s worked before, now seems not to. The focus by operational management on different strategies, different models of value, different information, and different approaches to marketing, are all red herrings.

What’s missing here is a simple thing, yet one that we rarely hear discussed. It’s direction. “Where to next. And why?”

The new leadership challenge

Direction is a problem of leadership – THE problem, in fact. And corporate leadership has been, overall, inconsistent of late. What has been lacking? If you think about it, you’ll see that the shared sense of meaning (and under that, the consequent shared sense of purpose, value and values) upon which confident and successful trade depends, has been diluted.

In the most useful, simplest, yet surprisingly often overlooked explanation, leaders lead by creating and managing meaning. They lead, in fact, by enacting the human values and standards that they, as individuals, stand for. They lead by standing up for, not just standing for, their values. This, fundamentally, is the core of the new corporate brand.

The gap between what’s promised in communications (and many leaders have been wrongly taught to see their jobs as being primarily about communication) and what’s tangibly experienced as leadership behaviour by the organisation’s internal and external global stakeholders, is what marks the success or failure of the leader.

Corporate strategy without cogent corporate direction is, to pirate a familiar phrase, simply “works without faith”.

The problem is that  leaders have no clear platform of meaning in which to address this issue. “If we don’t know why WE matter, how can we establish whether - and if so in what way – issue x or y matters?”

This is not a customer value problem

When have you ever heard customers talk about value? There’s value for money, but that commonly means simply the best available price, cheaper than anywhere else. Is that what business means by value? I prefer to assume not!

The value problem typically referred to by management, on the other hand, is the challenge of perceived customer value. “How do we convey the value of this new feature on our handset? Why is this drug better than the competitor? Is the new value of this or that service equal to the extra we need to charge in order to deliver it?”

Are these questions about customer value? I’d say no, they’re first about meaning. These problems rephrased are all essentially: “How do we establish sufficient customer meaning around this product, feature or service to enable an acceptable return for the business?”

How we experience leadership

How does leadership feel to a stakeholder? The employee, the customer, the investor, the watchdog, the excluded? Remember that these people are no longer remote from leadership – the network delivers a new kind of “blind intimacy”, wherein successes, failures, promises and betrayals are – now within minutes or hours rather than weeks or months – uncovered, shared and discussed. And acted upon, most importantly.

A failure of leadership is not experienced simply as a headline, a scandal. It’s experienced by the stakeholder emotionally and physically. We feel a sinking of the heart, a hollowness. I call this entropy. We’ve been feeling entropy with increasing frequency. Just watch the news. Walk round and look at people. See the world as it is.

Great leadership, in contrast – with the surges in shared meaning it creates among stakeholders – actually builds not just purpose, but energy. It fuels the organisation, all those who cluster around it and those who come into contact.

Today’s leadership challenge, before anything else, is to re-establish for commerce the shared platforms of meaning – among all stakeholder groups, not just customers – that will tell us where we’re now heading. And why. And that will provide the fresh energy that fuels the confident, credible forward movement we long for.

Why is branding important here?

Branding, by which I will, from here, mean no less than responsibility for how organisations are seen to behave, has, like marketing communications overall, recently contributed little of note in terms of useful insight to commerce. Commerce and its brands, in turn, have contributed almost nothing of note to the world.

The world, in the meantime, is now so networked, so data-savvy, and increasingly cynical, that the failings of corporations and brands are a daily feature of the news.

We can change that. This work is a manifesto, a form of compass, for a new way of thinking for business, a new way of leading for leaders, and a new, critical, role in the unfolding drama, for the discipline of branding.

We need – a crucial example of the new thinking – to accommodate a new and powerful challenge to leaders and the brands they represent – the global networked tribe.

As presented here, branding in The Age of Meaning is the mindset, the processes, the organisational commitment that drive this new shared energy and meaning, that authentic leaders must now create, through every touchpoint, to deliver and optimise a virtuous cycle of positive stakeholder experience and expectation.

My challenge to you

This is like nothing that’s ever been seen before.

Or is it? Think about Carphone Warehouse (note this was before Talk Talk and the David Ross scandal), John Lewis, Harley Davidson, Apple. These are not simply great brands. They are great organisations whose sense of shared meaning extends far out from their corporate headquarters. For them, brand is not mere messaging and imaging. It’s doing. Their branding is woven into their beliefs, the way they behave. And the way they are led.

You’ll find few statistics in this work. You’ll either intuitively get it, and then see the numbers that support the case. Or you won’t. And no amount of research will change your position.

But before we move on, ask yourself this: “What’s it going to be? Energy? Or Entropy?”

"The data. The data." (After Conrad. And Copolla, I guess)

Feel compelled to comment, albeit briefly and without enormous insight, on the sheer amount of security / trust / other sneaky stuff, that's in the headlines all of a sudden:

• The Labour blogging scandal, good old dirty tricks with a 2.0 spin on it: ugly and stupid ... and got caught - the hat trick;
• Amazon's clumsy handling of the gay authors issue ...
• ... alongside their - I tend to think commendable - Phorm-blocking move;
• The UK Goverment, in January and effective from March, sliding the ISP citizen-consumer spying law into place, with the usual guff about "only in certain circumstances will this be used" ... see David Stoughton's excellent post on this blog for the full smart dirty on that one;
• And just today, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys urges the dropping of hundreds of thousands of DNA records of entirely innocent people that the government and its cronies are saving up ... "just in case" ... Just in case, er, what? We suddenly run out of real villains and have to go after reg'lar folks?

Time - as I've done having discussed the ISP-bollox with m'learned friend Brian Millar - to give the Open Rights Group a bit of support.

PS something else that's been niggling me for many months now ... the stupidity of so-called smart advertising tools. Contextual, behavioural or whatever ...

Why on earth - when I'm reading about Nokia's 90% quarterly decline in profits (in itself an extremely important piece of business news) would I want to see an O2 ad offering me deals on Nokia phones? It makes, for example, blind cold-calling at home seem positively sparkling! This takes me back to my querulous post of a few days ago on how the future is no longer digital.

You might prefer the flip side

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

Commenting on declining sales following the crunch, the Economist notes, "It is tempting to conclude that, once economies rebound, customers will start spending again as they did before. Yet there are good reasons to think that what promises to be the worst downturn since the Depression will spark profound shifts in shoppers’ psychology." Some mistake, surely! The shift they observe started long ago, the downturn serves only to expose and accelerate a revolution in consumer markets that has been creeping up on us for years.

Ever since the Internet flooded the the market with information, customers have been using it to break up value chains and unravel established business models. As Mike Bayler has pointed out elsewhere in this blog (From value chain to eco-system) the earliest and most obvious example was in the packaged holiday market, but media and much of retail soon followed. Personal finance, the well-being end of the health market, and energy are well on their way and, as the Economist correctly observes, cautious customers in the wake of the crunch are speeding others into the whirlpool.

Until now the gradual pace of the change has served to disguise its extent, but what's happening is nothing short of a revolution - one that will transform, or sweep away, many established industries. Management faces greater challenges now than at any time since television accelerated mass marketing and kick-started the wave of consolidations preceding globalisation. With the crunch bringing the moment of truth ever closer for a majority of consumer industries, it may be time to stand many accepted strategic nostrums on their head.

Reverse everything

When customers gain control, suppliers are compelled to organise to meet what demand there is effectively. The search for ever increasing efficiencies, relying on marketing to shift ever growing volumes of product, is over. The business logic must change too. In the terms used by Theory of Constraints, the customer is now the bottleneck, the factor that constrains the volume you can produce. The same theory advises that everything else be subordinated to the bottleneck if maximum throughput is to be achieved. That requires you to think differently - try reversing almost every stage of traditional strategic analysis.

• Stop thinking of your market in terms of a product or service category - think instead of the category of customer concern or interest you serve. This changes, and sometimes obliterates, sector boundaries and enables you to think in terms of clusters of relevant, associated, consumer needs you can meet.

• Stop trying to build a community round the brand - instead build the brand round the community that naturally forms around key customer concerns.

• Stop thinking of consumers as a sink for production  - start thinking of them as collaborators and partners in identifying and responding to the needs of the community you are dedicated to serve. That way you expand the scope of your business and with it the services you can supply.

• Stop thinking in terms of geo-demographic or behavioural segments  - think rather of niches defined by particular clusters of customer concern, shared interests and circumstances, or a common and distinct sense of identity within the community.

• Stop thinking of your outlets as distribution channels - start thinking of them as the routes that customers mix and match according to preference to gain access to, and exchange experiences of, products, services, information, and advice, that meet their needs.

• Stop thinking in terms of value chains, supply chains and scale efficiencies - think instead of networks and your role within them. In particular decide whether, from the customer's perspective, you can be most effective as:- a butler, the apex of a pyramid of assistants designed to service every whim; a broker ensuring best value from each deal; a hub linking customers, suppliers and advisers together and with each other; or as a dashboard, presenting all the options and criteria impartially but leaving the choice entirely up to the customer. 

if you reason from the customer perspective and work backwards into your value proposition and the business that delivers on it, there is a good chance that the solution to an apparently disappearing market will be immediately obvious. It may entail making profound changes to your business model, but better face that fact now than wait for the axe to start falling and panic only when it may already be too late.

A French daydream

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

Fascinating development - why wasn't I watching when this commenced. President Sarkozy is trying to railroad a bill to 'curb illegal downloading' through the French parliament. The intended penalty involves cutting off the offender's access to the Internet, "... the agency would send three warnings to Internet customers whose line was being used for illicit downloading. If the use were to continue after that, they would be cut off for a period of one month to a year".

On Thursday of last week the bill was rejected on second reading, but only because the Socialists staged a sudden invasion (well, only a few extra were needed) of an otherwise nearly empty chamber. No-one is going to take no for answer though, "... the Government said that it would retable the law after Easter", when - barring a rebellion in the ranks - its substantial majority will ensure they can push it through.

Never mind that the the provisions are probably unenforceable - a new lease of life for Internet cafes is assured - this seems very uncharacteristic for the French. Sarkozy is proving not just more pro-American than any of his predecessors, but apparently a soft touch for big business lobbies as well - "The international recording and film industry is strongly behind the French law and they hope that, when enacted, it will set an example for the United States and other countries in the battle to end illegal downloading".

Actually, I can't help feeling some sympathy with smaller French media companies (we should not forget that France has its global media giants too). They have a restricted market and, apparently, the French are avid consumers of illegally downloaded content, "... about one third of French Internet users admit doing so". Many of the small players may lack the scale to survive while new business models are established and new streams of revenue replace existing ones.

The bigger picture, however, is of continued paralysis in a media industry unable to accept the bald fact that their business has changed. To imagine that persuading a French president to try sticking a finger in the dike will really hold back the flood is breathtakingly myopic. I appreciate that there may be something like panic in the ranks as new models take time to emerge; I can understand trying to buy time to adapt; but I fear it's more likely this is yet another refusal to face facts. A lot of resources that could be devoted to innovation must be being squandered on continued lobbying. I know pockets in the sector are deep but, leaving aside whether it is helpful, is this wise? Doesn't it just reinforce a set of, no longer tenable, assumptions about the market that amount to believing at least four impossible things before breakfast?

• That consumers are still the passive consumers of inbound content we've known and loved, really; not the out-of-control production line for outbound media that frightens us;
• That they have the same use for, and place the same value on, content now as before the pesky Internet interfered;
• That they have just as much time and attention as previously to devote to our stuff; and so that,
• If only the leaks can be plugged, demand will return to its old level and revenues restored, or (hope springs eternal) reinforced.

It is this blind faith that the value of media is a constant, or at least varies only with quality, that has deprived the industry of its ability to respond. Another foray into 'punishing the naughty children' will not restore a world that is history now, even if Sarkozy is fool enough to believe it will.

The end of the road for digital?

At the risk of being more controversial than this fragile market could bear, let me present a fledgling argument that keeps floating back into my head. I'll continue to explore it in the coming weeks.

I just don't think the future's digital. It is for you and I of course, as people, as citizen-consumers. We're still  in the foothills of the personal, cultural and social transformations wrought by web and rich-featured mobility.

I'm talking, for example, about music and for advertising, two industries (well, perhaps music's no longer big enough to be called "an industry") that are themselves in the foothills of post-Internet reinvention. But both are starting to accept that in many senses, digital is more agent of destruction than saviour of value.

Music has in the past year come to broadly accept that downloads will never replace physical sales. Having been initially too suspicious of the digital suitor, the business then jumped into its arms, and is now thinking about moving back to Mum's. But the old bedroom's not there any more ... we're forced forwards to ... what exactly?

This has accelerated, and made more urgent, the drive to the still-vague "bands and brands" field of opportunity.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire in a sense: advertisers themselves are in flux as well as crisis, and while always intrigued by the music discussion, still uncertain as to the argument for moving big money away from the home turf of big ads.

Outside of music and other forms of consumer engagement, advertisers are increasingly expressing a clear and just as urgent desire to move significant focus and spend away from "reach and frequency" based models of communication, and towards what are broadly talked of as digital channels. Social media in particular is viewed as a must-have area for consumer engagement: there's a sense that given the flight to Facebook and Twitter by their audiences, this is a nut that absolutely must be cracked to sustain any credible form of consumer connection.

All fine. But is this really about digital? I think not. The challenge for brands is exacerbated by the very word. Describing Facebook and Twitter as digital channels is not only tautological - it misses the point: they are, for more importantly, new behaviours that derive from quite fundamental changes in culture.

To approach such transformations in the marketing landscape as "digital" - and indeed from the advertiser and agency point of view, to see that landscape as still mainly concerning "media" - is to pose questions that yield feeble, disempowering answers. Social media are problematic precisely because they are only media in the very precise, academic, McLuhanist sense of being "extensions of man". This is not your mothers' media, and pumping content and messaging into such environments is not the answer.

So, both music - and perhaps eventually much of entertainment - and advertising, are hugely affected by the digital revolution, and indeed digital channels are where much of the battle is fought.

But look at the commercial value that the cultural and consumer impacts of the web have already sucked out. The future's digital? Certainly not. The future's ... what exactly, then?

More on this soonest, and comments more than welcome - urgently sought!

Through the Looking Glass to the new consumer

It was very last century to point out that “the Internet’s just another channel”. Those who actually used the web knew better, but it was harder than you’d have thought to counter this regrettable claim. We said things like: “Yes, but it IS very very different”, and “But you must admit, interactivity DOES rather change the communications landscape”.

What we were driving at – bless us! – was an explanation of what we deeply felt and saw, but couldn’t yet explain. It was, with hindsight, something like this: that the experience of online communications was changing the way we experience our world. The Internet, we now know, changes everything. (But only if you let it. The talk of “just another channel” does till continue, dressed perhaps less prosaically, to today.)

Again, if you use the thing in anger, and, as I do, try to help all sorts of diverse players find their way in the space, your point of view is informed by both hands-on experience and time for reflection. We’ve had the rare good fortune to work with firms who are willing to go way beyond “just another channel”, to learn what’s really going on out there, and what it means: for brand, for media owner, for rights owner and talent – most of all, for consumer.

We’ve discovered working with them that the impact of digital media is more profound, far reaching and permanent than even the most crushing riposte to “just another channel” could convey. Not only are outbound communications – narrow-cast, one-to-one, exquisitely personalised and all the rest – far from being the big story in media futures. Not only are peer-to-peer, socially-based and motivated communications – increasingly habitual for the MeTV generation – now part and parcel, albeit uncertainly, of the most humdrum media plan. In 2007 these developments are, in the light of the market’s twists and turns over the past say 2 years, the stuff of Media 101.

No. The thing about the new media is that their most important role in marketing has yet to unfold. It’s far more challenging and exciting than we could have imagined.

As networked consumers in affluent societies live their increasingly mediated - yet paradoxically media-independent – lives, they play hide-and-seek (all too rarely, caught) with advertisers, media- and rights-owners who are desperate to add some sort of value, in order to simply grab back a little of the wandering attention they crave. We instinctively – and not entirely wrongly – wrack our brains to find the flowers that will attract these so-discerning bees to brush up on our pollen.

At the risk of over-extending our bee-type metaphor, “buzz” around the brand, or its related activities in media, becomes an area of increasing interest. We search for a mechanism for evaluating ROI, that matches the new value dimension (beyond the familiar, now less-useful, reach and frequency). We sometimes call this Engagement, perhaps best modelled as “time with the brand versus percentage of active attention captured”. We begin to measure – to quite a precise degree – how various unique words, ideas, media objects, brands, movements, trends (“memes”, even, to the initiated) are faring out there across the world’s networks.

And yes, this does tell us how well our outbound campaigns are performing, and feeds into our understanding and calculation of achieved individual and group Engagement with our brands, our channels and our content. And yes, this does enable us to fine tune our campaigns – targeting as well as creative – using the accepted tools of adtech, through to some fascinating behavioural techniques.

But we’re missing the biggest trick here. Turn the telescope around, Lord Nelson-style. It’s not the media that consumers are looking at that holds the true promise of the marketing future. It’s the real-time insight that our access to what they’re doing, what they say, what they like, and most of all, how we can then act – in hopefully short order – to enhance their experience of this mediated life with “experience plus” support from the supplicant brand.

Digital media represent infinitely more than “just another channel”. Most of us grasp that by now. But they’re also far beyond, we realise, “another very different channel that’s changing the rules of communication”. They offer the beginnings of an intelligent dashboard for the risky, punishing Rollerball game of real-time marketing, that today and tomorrow is the true challenge of every major media stakeholder. No longer is it just How Do We Reach Them? … it’s Listen and Learn. And then Act. The brand promise, if you like, is now built on, not merely proven by, delivery – the cart comes before the horse.

Why? Because the most important messages are no longer the ones that we push out there … they are the ones that come back up what surely can no longer be “another channel”.

Innovate or die

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

Several revealing interviews on 'In business' last night affirm what what we know instinctively is happening - innovation continues to flourish within the, ever inventive, small business sector. The crunch has not noticeably dented their spirits, if anything these players see this as the ideal time to launch new products and services. If capital is a little harder to come by, the same spirit of invention quickly finds alternative ways to launch and grow. Meanwhile established businesses struggle to make sales - the public humiliation of some great, established, institutions is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is shaping up to be a time of upheaval, of the 'creative destruction' that Joseph Schumpeter hails as “the essential fact about capitalism”. The signs are that, if some of its flag bearers over the last fifty years are having reservations about its future, capitalism is renewing itself in the time honoured fashion.

Giant corporations, with few exceptions, are notoriously bad at developing and launching the genuinely new. The failure rate is frightening. Depending on the authority, approximately 70% of new product development projects fail and, perhaps more tellingly “between 33% and 60% of all new products that reach the market place fail to generate desired economic returns” (Smith, P. and Reinertsen D.). Notice the weasel words, ‘that reach the market place’- many, perhaps most, never get that far.

Individuals and small businesses probably fail just as often at innovation: the research does not distinguish the causes of business failure in this sector. But individuals and small businesses are both more plentiful and more resilient - they bounce back with a new, or refreshed, idea and a new business vehicle, ready to start again within months. The odds are not good that, in a straight race to bring new products and services to market, big business will win.

The traditional remedy, of course, is to wait until the upstarts have proved the concept (and taken the initial risk) and then buy them. The success rate here is nothing to write home about either - as we know, many of these acquisitions fail - but the odds are slightly better than doing it yourself.

There's a catch though. Buying up companies requires good judgement (many fail to grow as predicted), the capacity to integrate and capitalise on unfamiliar processes and cultures, and deep pockets. All of these, especially the last, tend to be eroded in a sharp downturn. Many corporations will emerge without the readies, or the resilience, for successful acquisition - and anyway it may be too late by then.

Something has to be done now if the future is to be secured. Given the low success rates in new product development, big business should play on the part of the pitch where it has the advantage, better targeting, superior customer service and improved experience.

The fact is, there is more than one direction for successful innovation at present, if managements think clearly. The incumbent's advantage lies in ownership of the route to market - that is having the brand, capacity, and reputation for service that the majority of customers value. These are the attributes that newcomers lack, and can build only slowly.

I'm betting that the two keys to surviving a storm of creative destruction are:

1. Secure the front, market-facing, end of the business - by introducing innovations to the experience and service that bind the customer more closely to the company;
2. Increase agility at the back, supply, end - by improving agility in partnering, developing skills in brokering value networks and in assembling supply chains quickly, so that the newcomers see reaching their market through the corporation as the quickest and safest way to grow scale.

There are many advantages to such a strategy. Not least that the necessary development can be undertaken in small, incremental, tranches - no 'bet the farm' projects are required - and the initiative will expose equivalent opportunities for savings in areas that will add little or no value for customers or company in the future.

Innovation is a real opportunity for established businesses after all, and far more radical in its results than conventional product development - it just takes a less dramatic form while in progress. Most of the biggest opportunities of the future lie in owning the horizontal platform which customers rely on for whole categories of goods and services, not the vertically integrated, unitary, value chains that are becoming a millstone round the neck of their owners and managements.

Living in the goldfish bowl

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

When I was eleven and twelve I experienced a crisis with religion. Although not from an especially religious family, I went to schools where religion featured prominently - in the syllabus, not just at morning prayers. Indeed, I recall winning a scripture prize around that time.

The crisis, when it came, was one of claustrophobia tinged with paranoia. I had been fed on a diet of stories about the omnipotent, all-seeing, god who watched over us. One who knows not just what you’re up to … but what you’re thinking as well. No chance of a respite, nowhere you could call your own. Oh, and there was a rider, ‘anything you think can, and will, be used against you in a higher court’.

The reminder that, “details of user e-mails and net phone calls will be stored by internet service providers (ISPs) from Monday under an EU directive,” recalls that time strongly for me. We live in an age where surveillance is the leitmotif of our culture.

We are all familiar with the facts. Data on us is gathered, tracked, and stored by a score of, more or less authorised, agencies; and we are under continuous observation, “ (with) more than 4 million surveillance cameras, the UK is the most watched nation in the world, in relation to the size of our population”. Shortly, ID cards and biometrics will extend both the scope of the data kept about us, and the range of those who have access to it.

I know that, occasionally, the data this surveillance tracks helps to keep us secure. Only yesterday more suspected terrorists, who had clearly been under surveillance for many weeks, were picked up – rather hastily, after an entirely typical security blunder. More often though it is used, and abused, for altogether less defensible purposes. “Councils in England and Wales have used controversial spying laws 10,000 times in the past five years, figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats show… officials have been using it to spy on suspected dog fouling, littering and other minor offences.”

More alarmingly if, like me, the goldfish bowl scares you, “a survey of more than 180 local authorities found:

• 1,615 council staff have the power to authorise the use of Ripa (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act).
• 21% (or 340) of these staff are below senior management grade”

But, of course, it’s not just government that wants our data; business gets in on the act too, and they are just as indifferent to principle. “Nearly half of UK companies could be breaching the Data Protection Act (DPA) through the misuse of customer data,” said a report in 2006. And then there are the hackers. They want to know all about you too – well, obviously!

So I’m beginning to feel like I’m back in that goldfish bowl – but this time being watched from all sides. Shortly I expect to wake up to hear one of these agencies whispering, “we know what you’re thinking”, and then I’ll be thrown back completely into that late-childhood paranoia.

Can inducing paranoia in the populace really be excused on the grounds of its occasional benefits? Even if it can, where is the respect? Sometimes I find myself thinking the hackers have more respect than government. At least they have the decency to attribute some value to our data. They buy and sell the stuff. Unlike government, which shares your data with almost anyone who can offer a half convincing excuse - sorry, I mean reason. Or just leaves it on the train.

The value of back catalogue in a meta-media world?

One of the more vexing questions facing rights owners in the post-Internet age is how to realise best value from their back catalogues. When content is commonly viewed as all-you-can-eat, and when the controlled and focused model of distribution through fixed channels, evolves into a model of simple release, where consumers are left - collaboratively and individually - to find value more or less serendipitously as they drift across networks, how are we to evaluate and market rights?

I sat a while back with a senior executive of a very large production company whose worth, it emerged in the discussion, was significantly determined by analysts as a direct function of their large and reasonably credible back catalogue of drama, news, sport and documentary programming. My colleague was, I felt rightly, disturbed by the instinct that the company was a hostage to fortune: "Where, when and most of all, how are these rights going to realise the level and range of exploitation that the City is, literally, banking on?

Not that the traditional revenue streams associated with catalogue have gone away, and I won't go into those here: readers will be more or less familiar with the landscape. But the concerns of the rights holding community are well-founded, in that the upward pressure of the investor's dreams of fresh - largely digital, alarmingly - profits, combined with the very real downward pressure of the market reality - where both consumer attention and advertised spend look increasingly unreliable - smacks clearly of rock and hard place.

"500 (or 300 or even 25) channels and nothing on ...". Is this just about quality of content, or more interestingly about consumer or audience relevance? One man's boring rubbish is another man's compelling and timely instruction or distraction ... M'learned friend Rory Sutherland of OgilvyOne points out that, when for example battling with the assembly of a flat pack piece of furniture from Ikea, a plodding, step-by-step video manual to the mobile, irrespective of dry Scandinavian voice-over, would be seized upon like water in the desert.

Levelling the terrain dangerously, but in order to make this point: we are reaching a time in our post-internet culture where meta-content - data about content - alongside "meta-taste" - information about user preferences - is becoming commercially more important than the content itself ... But how could the index possibly be of greater value than the book?

Whether through search, social media, traditional hard-slog research, pure luck, or “Media Through Wandering About” (surfing), the consumer’s chances of finding media content they value and might pay for with cash or quality attention (thereby supporting advertising investment) – putting aside genre for the sake of brevity, though clearly that is very influential on preference and value – are dramatically improved through tagging of one sort or another.

And while users are – again generalising broadly – consciously, deliberately or unconsciously by publisher/retailer automation – tagging the content they encounter with their various associations – let’s agree to call this “folksonomy” - rights owners have some catching up to do on the taxonomy side of this crucial equation. Standards of mark-up language pre-existed – indeed fed the evolution of – html in the form of the publisher’s standard “sgml”.

Rights owners and publishers, to enable and capitalise upon the finding, preference, sharing and consumption of their back-catalogue media by consumers, must find ways to develop and link the meta-content of their media assets, with the declared meta-tastes of the consumer, to move towards ensuring that the value of their catalogue is – while we will never return to the Eden of a truly lucrative, growth-enabling syndication-based distribution model – at least optimised for the “planned serendipity” that is so often the model of discovery and exploitation.

The experience of trust

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

Give a dog a bone! I can't stop worrying away at this one. The antics of the bankers won't let me. So, to the matter in hand.

Yesterday RBS announced it was laying off another 9,000 staff, most of them in 'back office and support' roles. Meanwhile the Bankers Association has been flagging the probable end of free personal banking. Now I'm aware banks have a desperate need to cut costs and start to repay some of those stupendous loans we've been co-opted into making to them. I'm all in favour of them giving the dosh back, and as soon as possible, but is this really the best way to go about it?

I've harped on about trust here, but there turns out to be more to say. Trust is easy to lose, a private south sea bubble just between bankers turns out to be an excellent model. It is very hard to earn. It can only be won on the front line, in the day-to-day transactions that are the stuff of customers' experience.

Child psychologists point out that the process of bonding with a parent is the model for all human trust relationships, and depends heavily on emotional responsiveness and consistency. Absence of response, or inconsistent behaviour, on the part of the parent creates a variety of dysfunctional behaviours in the child, many of which persist into adult life. Such failures of parenting are recognised forms of abuse.

There is a lesson here for retail bankers, and consumer businesses in general. Extensive marketing and expansive promises, accompanied by long waits and indifferent, and often literally non-human, responses to the enquiries that follow, is inconsistent. Credit scoring in place of the evident exercise of personal judgement is a failure of human response.  In sum the lesson is this: 'It's the experience, stupid!'. Only a service that matches the brand promise, consistent handling of day-to-day interactions, and evident, human, consideration for special requests, is likely to rebuild a shattered relationship. As with an abused child, it will take a long time to restore. Meanwhile, asking people to pay up for a broken process may mean it never happens.

Willing adoptive, or foster, parents come forward to rescue children from dysfunctional families. Just so, the established retail banks should remember that the supermarkets, amongst others, have existing or planned services that will quickly spirit away their most valuable customers if they don't get on with mending their core relationships.

To return to RBS and its staff reductions. Back office and support workers may be just the ones needed if banks are to successfully improve the experience. They may have little day-to-day contact, but their work can free up front-line staff to focus on the customer. The only rational way to cut in a crisis is to focus hard on retaining, and if you're in the condition banks are, improving your customer-facing services first - whatever that takes. Then, and only then, should you let go of non-core staff. Given the state of retail banking services, I find it hard to believe that such consideration has been given. I do believe the consequences of a failure to do so will be little short of disasterous - and RBS still has my money.

Last year's writers' strike revisited

A personal hero of mine, and source of encouragement when times are tough for those of us loopy enough to dream we could make money out of ideas, is the legendary screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, the man who intimately acquainted an entire generation of movie-goers across the world with Sharon Stone in the hugely popular thriller Basic Instinct.

Joe is notorious for more than this in-itself immense feat. He champions – with the cojones of one who really does not care either way – the role of screen writers as core, not peripheral, to the quality and success of movies and TV shows. And he walks the talk. The man sold a four page treatment – a sketched idea for a movie – for several million dollars to a studio. Deliciously, the film was I gather never made. Joe is also – perhaps understandably given the context and history of his career – very tetchy about changes to his script … along the lines of, if you change one word, I pull the script and the movie is no longer.

Joe, therefore, knows the secret of life on and behind the screen. The only way to win and keep winning in Hollywood (at least at his Olympian level), is to be crazier than anyone who may imagine themselves more powerful than you are, and never, ever, ever, back down.

Perhaps the influence of Joe Eszterhas was finally felt, as the writers of many of the world’s most valuable shows took to the streets.

You can read the ins and outs of the writers’ strike elsewhere of course. But let me point out an interesting set of coincidences that played out around the same time across the globe.

France, as we all know, has been the cultural nemesis of America’s cultural products for the better part of a century, and it’s here that industrial – indeed cultural action – was getting mighty lively. Hollywood may do entertainment better – at least bigger – than the rest, but the French give great social mayhem. And it was the controversial (of course …) French philosopher Jean Baudrillard who pointed out that the true role of Disneyland was not to provide a childlike escape from the reality of life, but to persuade us that the utter fantasy of modern American life is in fact, real.

Moving away from strikes, let’s talk about the other end of the content pipe, and a debate that affects the very core of medial value. Those darn free papers! In London you can’t walk 50 yards without having a chunk of semi-adequate news thrust – literally – into your hands by beaming distributors. I can’t help feeling they suspect every passer-by to be the corporate equivalent of a mystery shopper, checking on levels of enthusiasm and aggression in this guerrilla distribution, this “pushy” media. Along with the “HELLO! Spare a minute for the children of the blind postmen sir!” maniacs who appear to occupy the meagre remaining pavement space left unoccupied by the free paper pushers, I’m afraid really wish THESE people would go on strike. Forever.

What am I on about, what’s my point? My point, or my main point at least, is that all these concurrent phenomena invite us to speculate about – to reconsider – the meaning and value of media content.

What was being withheld from us when Hollywood’s writers of dreams held the studios and stations to ransom? When the greatest television shows in the world … dried up? Was it the fantasy world of our after-dinner flop in front of the telly that suffered? If that’s all it is, then why do we feel this frisson of panic, at the unlikely closure of THE dream factory?

What is the effect of this determined thrusting of news into our hands, not to mention these “attention muggings” resorted to by worthy causes? We know that all of Big Newspaperdom is wondering – right this minute – whether a zero cover price is the only way to go, to sustain the consumer attention that feeds the ad sales that drive the presses. But there seems to be more here than simple commercial imperative.

And what, as stiff-upper-lip Saxons, do we feel when confronted – again via the news media – by those Ballardian images of French rioting?

It’s all about the fight for our attention of course. The French strikers – like it or not – commanded the attention of the authorities and the public – now worldwide. The paper pushers insist – on behalf of their own bosses – that all this selective content-browsing and ad-dodging has got to stop. Back on your heads, as the joke goes. And those patient geniuses behind the folks behind the cameras? They’re just reminding us – like Eszterhas, like Baudrillard, and like the French strikers – of the reality behind the fantasy of modern mediated life.

The Mary Whitehouse in the machine

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

Another week (OK last week), another report to government on Internet use and social media, drawing the usual conclusions. Young people using the Internet extensively are losing the touch with the world. They are inept in real social situations, perform poorly in various academic tests, marginally autistic etc. Disaster looms as a whole generation loses it. I don't recognise these individuals, do you?

In fact I recall, though I can't find it now, a report from Pew Research which apparently found that those who use social media sites most, also spend most face-time with their peers. Others have suggested that games-playing speeds the reflexes, that visual and communication skills are growing and, in general, extensive use of social media and mobiles is attended by a range of new, or sharpened abilities.

So, who is right here! Well, I don't have any conclusive evidence that would tip the argument either way. So I won't try. What I find interesting is that the negative reports nearly always emerge from government advisers, educational pundits and even parliamentary committees; whereas the positive ones seem to emanate from independent or university led research programmes.

In the sixties Mary Whitehouse led a campaign against the evils of that great destroyer of the minds of children, television. She and her followers, however, felt themselves to be on the outside, desperately trying to alert an indifferent government to the social destruction the growing beast was meting out. Big business interests and the establishment conspired, so she seemed to think, to encourage the growth of TV against the interests of the nation, because they were all making money out of it.

This time the situation is reversed. It's government and big media (today's establishment) that see disaster ahead, and other interested parties who are often positive. Is this the money connection again? Some media certainly see themseves as the losers, and perhaps government indirectly does too; leaned on by those media giants and perhaps perceiving a steady stream of tax revenue under threat. The Mary Whitehouse de nos jours is the establishment, while the rest of the world just gets on with exploring the possibilities.

Your brand is the ball (redux)

A metaphor that I developed in 2007 to explain the difficulties in achieving true 360˚ planning - and to point the way towards a comprehensive and inclusive framework for mapping all forms of consumer-brand encounter, from TV to tribal, if you like - is drawn from the golden age of TV.

We call it "your brand is the ball" ...

First, think about tenpin bowling. You put all your focus into heaving - with great skill and effort - a weighty, unwieldy lump of a ball down a very narrow channel, to knock over as many pins as possible. Note that the success of the entire game is predicated on a) precise targeting and placement of the ball - including a certain amount of spin and b) a very focused, "one-off" burst of energy to propel the ball with sufficient force to the pins at the end of the lane.

A strike - all ten pins bashed into oblivion (before, rather eerily, the machine assembles them and lowers them calmly back down for the next Herculean blast of ball) is celebrated briefly and explosively - high fives all round - before the next round - in all respects an identical process to the previous one - begins.

20th century media was largely about targeting and hitting consumers with the same message repeatedly - and repeatably. All the targeting and spin was provided by planning, and huge, often quite simple media buys (investments in large bursts of media energy) were invested by brands. The bowling metaphor explains the dynamic neatly.

While the easily-pleased and - I imagine - right-livin' Richie Cunninghams were ploughing the lanes, in another, shadier part of town the Arthur Fonzarellis were playing ... Pinball! And what a complete difference.

In the post-internet, tribal 21st century, we score highest - as per the pinball analogy - when we get the ball (the brand, as you’ll remember) into the high-scoring bumper zone at the top of the table.
This is almost completely out of control, serendipitous, and the only control we do have is the feeble flippers at the bottom of the board. And we use those only to try to get the ball back up those riotous bumpers.

Just like tribes of networked consumers, when they take on a piece of media or an idea and start kicking it about ... brand awareness and often equity explode upwards. Or of course, downwards ...

A subtle, critical element of this new model needs clear understanding. Think for a second about the raucous effect of those bumpers - they have their own proprietary energy don't they? They push out and push back, and when the ball - the brand - connects with them, that consumer-side tribal energy comes into explosive, out-of-control play. This is where the pinball metaphor hits home, and where formal planning struggles to achieve any sort of traction - geared as it is to managing only one sort of energy: outbound bought media - in 21st century tribal environments.

Oh ... And if we push the pin table too hard? Well, neatly, it just tilts the whole machine ... Game Over.

Given that it is precisely here that much of the most significant brand equity is now built, I see this anarchic pinball machine as the core challenge currently facing brand communications.

Happy Days, eh?

Books that point the way forward - 1964 to today

Two great movie quotes from the golden age of media keep coming back to my mind … “Who are those guys?” (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” (Network)

Why so? Well, they speak to me not only of the chasm of alienation (the “otherness” if you will) that is growing between Big Media and the mobile networked consumer, but also the impression of this consumer actively pulling away from prescribed content, brand messaging and anything at all that isn’t, well, 100% on their terms.

A number of excellent thinkers in recent years have taken on the intimidating challenge of helping us a) to understand who those guys are and b) why we/they are mad enough not to take it anymore.

Why isn’t the old model working, how could we reconnect with this lost consumer? Above all, can we stop obsessing the technological and commercial issues, and turn our attention to where value is really being driven, to the social and cultural drivers of Media 2.0.

The New Economist: Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks
Benkler’s weighty and ambitious 2007 masterpiece (the bold title of the book harks back of course to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations) digs deep into the dynamics of what he calls “non-market” value creation (of which User Generated and Shared content is perhaps one of the more simple examples). When the means of production and distribution are free, and when open source culture continues to swell, what are the Big Implications for world commerce. If you’re feeling less than robust, a good idea to pay someone else to read this one for you.

The New Utopian: Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence
Ah, the French point of view! Always refreshing, always quotable, wildly ambitious, quite frequently wrong … and always guaranteed to upset somebody. (A good thing in itself, I’d say.) Think Baudrillard, think Foucault, think Derrida and dozens more. While clearly off the same style farm, network visionary/sociology professor Pierre Levy’s passionate, smart and very comprehensive look at “just how far we could go” in the era of social networks is a powerful antidote to the (now thankfully dwindling) tsunami of Web 2.0 lunacy

The New Populist: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
Now in paperback common language work of genius that manages to do what no one else here has done … to bring the subject of social network value and cultures to life for the ADD-tinged colour supplement readers among us. I fell in love with the title before I even considered buying the book. Probably the must-have in this list, or at least a very good starting point for deeper inquiry.

The New Marketer: Grant McCracken, Flock and Flow
Marketing is no longer the fluffy job it used to be, and the no-nonsense NY-based consultant Mr McCracken takes as his key premise the pivotal Road Warrior (back to those movie lines again) quote, where Mel Gibson (formerly known as Mad Max, now … OK, don’t go there) drawls “You wanna get out of here? You talk to me.” Flock and Flow takes on the fierce task of describing how and why market dynamics now create such challenges for brands, and a manual for how to stay ahead of the curve. An astringent and ballsy work that you need to buy, if only to make sure he writes the next one.

The New Sociologist: Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity
With the exception of the next work listed here, the oldest publication. But Lord Giddens’ insight into the touchpoints between self, society and new technology remain to my mind unsurpassed. If you want to know why ringtones are more prized than MP3’s ever will be, but don’t want to read any more about ringtones, MP3’s or anything to do with mobile content (and I’ll bet you don’t …), read this book. Slowly. Sorry, no pictures either.

The Old Master: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
I’m still startled at how many folks in our line have managed to reach maturity without reading the work that started it all in 1964. If you find yourself in that endangered species, I won’t grass you up. But do something about it sharpish, OK?

The Shameful Plug: Bayler and Stoughton, Promiscuous Customers, Invisible Brands
Published in 2002, still more or less holding its own as a manual for digital value creation.

Trust - a reprise, one of many I expect

David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:

Today I receive a communication from Harvard Business Review (HBR) apparently reporting the obvious.

"Bad decisions have taken a toll on the level of trust we have in organisations, institutions, and, for some of you, even each other. Last month we asked you about trust and found that relative to a year ago:

• Three-quarters of you trust senior management in US companies less
• Half trust senior management of non-US companies less
• About one-fifth trust academic institutions less
• And 10% of you trust your colleagues less"

They, HBR, are proposing to debate these findings in their forum. I'm afraid I can't feel great confidence that such a discussion will shed much light. In fact I think HBR might do well to question rather closely its own role in pumping up the egos of of the self-important Alpha Males who've been allowed to run riot across our financial and business landscape.

In any event, an almost self-referential study of self-selecting readers of a business journal tells us little about the broader issues. It does, though, open up another discomforting perspective. I suppose that a poll amongst the public would yield similar, perhaps higher, levels of distrust in management. I doubt that they would have greatly lost trust in academic institutions, but I may be wrong. I'm fairly sure that most would trust their peers, and in a work context, immediate colleagues more than this implies.

However, we all have a right to feel distressed about these revelations about trust within and between businesses. Not only has something many people suspected been amply demonstrated - the lunatics really have been running the asylum. Now they've realised it themselves and are turning on each other. Some hope then, that big business is going to help solve the problems it's created. It seems we really must look elsewhere.

Of course not all businesses have participated in their own downfall. Those who refrained must, like the rest of us, feel aggrieved that they must suffer the consequences. I have two questions that I'd dearly like to know the answer to.

1. To what extent does the public distinguish between the wreckers and their fellow victims?
2. What effect, if any, does this have on their perception of big brands? Does the brand suffer from the knock-on effect or is it, paradoxically, reinforced?

At rock bottom I suspect that, for the public, another of those fundamentals of behavioural economics applies - the 'We're in This Together' (Witt) instinct. Co-sufferers unite! For business (and brands?) this cuts both ways. Either you're also in it with us, or you're against us. Polarisation is likely to rule, with potentially drastic consequences for the possible survival of those perceived to be in the wrong camp.

Perhaps it's this that drives distrust of staff for their business leaders. It's not a good time to be on the wrong side. Is the inflated ego at the helm even capable of accepting the possibility of error, let alone acknowledging it? What does that spell for the business I work in, for my job, my career?