What if? That is the question you need to ask and answer—multiple times every single day. The solution to every marketing problem begins with this question.
The best marketers don’t ask either/or questions. They don’t seek answers to questions such as: “Transactions or relationships?” “High touch or high tech?” “Purpose or profit?” “Size or speed?” There is no doubt that we all must make difficult choices in executing brand strategy. But it’s no longer about giving up something that is important to you and your customers. In many cases, asking “What if?” helps you find new ways to navigate an ill-defined obstacle course.
An Obstacle Course For Decision Making
What if I asked you to run through the woods on a muddy trail with me? That’s exactly what my co worker Laurel Geisbush asked me to do in 2013 when I arrived at Microsoft. But this wasn’t your average mud run. This was an obstacle and endurance course created by two Harvard Business School students, Guy Livingstone and Will Dean. Its name? Tough Mudder.
Tough Mudder is a great analogy for the world we occupy as marketers. The demanding physical course features several decision-making scenarios requiring the traverser to work creatively and collaboratively to be successful. To the unacquainted, the obstacle course can be a mare’s nest of irrational decision making, whether there is one leader everyone follows or if everyone attempts the course on his or her own. That’s the point. What the organizers want you to do is to make decisions—many of them uncomfortable—quickly and spontaneously.
In Tough Mudder, groups think obstacles through “on the y” benefit from using a “What if” rather than an “Either/or” decision-making process, although several of the obstacles require a straight linear-thought trajectory.
The Biggest Obstacle: Consumers In Control
Shaping business around real customer behavior is the challenge facing us as marketers today. It’s our version of Tough Mudder. Unfortunately, companies are still built and structured to solve linear, twentieth-century marketing issues. The marketing skills that used to work splendidly are incompatible with today’s world.
Phillipa Reed, director at Think Big Social, in London, defined the current situation brilliantly when she wrote about brands in a thought-leadership piece for LinkedIn: “There is an increasing trend away from consumers simply being influenced by brands, to the point where brands are now increasingly being controlled and influenced by their consumers.”
The primary driver of this distinct trend is the influence that social networks, smartphones, apps, online forums, and blogs have had on how we live our lives. The continuing takeover by digital media has ushered in the reimagination of the roles once controlled by brand strategists, media buyers, advertising agencies, brands, and marketing departments. While customers were once subject to the whim of brand messages, they now can act as media creators, publishers, producers, and critics. In other words, brands have less control than ever before and must be willing to adapt to this newfound reality.
Ask yourself:
- What if we developed messages as marketers that had nothing to do with stories, but more to do with social responsibility?
- What if we decided to ditch all the ways we as marketers have tried to improve brand perception via impression-based metrics and instead looked to other metrics such as sentiment as a guide for our efforts?
- What if we disrupt revenue models gained from conventional practices like media buying and advertising for more nonconventional practices like customer relationship management (CRM) and customer design and development of new products?
Sounds easy and dangerous at the same time, doesn’t it? Well, for some of you it may be too dangerous, which is one reason that marketing is stagnating. In my opinion, mainstream marketing is not changing to reflect rapidly evolving customer behavior.
The Biggest Problem: Sticking To The Old Ways Of Solving Problems
One of the biggest problems in business is the unwillingness to come up with new ways to creatively solve problems. In the agency world where I spent most of my career, people are always trying to solve problems. Customer-experience problems, client problems, design problems, technology problems. Most work in the twenty-first century will revolve around problem solving. Why? Because the world is complex. We face a number of hurdles that non-imaginative and non-people-centric problem-solving models will have a hard time addressing.
For example, too many businesses treat customer problems as employee problems. Because employees are not able to solve a customer’s problem, they blame it on the employee’s incompetence, instead of looking for new solutions. They are unwilling to try different things to solve the customer’s issues. And the cycle goes on and on.
Why is that? I believe that in part it’s the consultants to whom businesses turn for answers. Most business books, for example, are written by professionals who hide behind their MBA and or 30 years of experience as if they were badges of honor, when in fact the indicators of success that we used to take for granted are now irrelevant, thanks to data and indirect knowledge. As a result, books and blogs with rigidly defined, step-by-step, linear solutions may seem helpful but can actually be harmful in the real business world. Their assumptions are incorrect because they are centered on methodology and technology, not on people.
Solving problems by asking the “What if” question is more helpful because it takes people into consideration rather than simply following a set of pre-established resolution blueprints. For every problem you are trying to solve, you should be asking more questions. The Socratic Method is as popular as ever in a liberal arts education because it helps develop critical thinking skills that are so needed in the business world—including marketing—for the twenty-first century.
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