Being direct... AdVantage Aug 2002
Houston ...
We Have a Problem ... !!
During the three years that I have been writing these columns, I have written on a few occasions about the issue of perceived 'control' in business communications. As most of the readers of AdVantage make their bread through advertising, it is most likely that my attempts at sounding a warning about change and the future of marketing communication - might fall on deaf ears. Nevertheless, I have recently read two completely diverse items that have again woken my concern about the effect of continuing change on that which some in our business have come to take for granted.
In order to amplify on the point, let's consider the first of these: a piece in the May 27 issue of Fortune magazine entitled, 'Why companies fail?' In this well researched article, authors Ram Charan and Jerry Useem highlight some ten mistakes that CEO's have a tendency to make - but who then blame everything else under the sun, for the state that their companies land up in.
To try and paraphrase some of the content: Charan and Useem make the initial point that 'capitalism's true genius is to weed out companies that no longer serve a useful purpose', but they also describe the findings of their research: 'that failed companies make an incremental descent into poor judgement…. most failures, even the most apparently dramatic - have been years in the making'. It should come as no surprise that the authors advise: 'what undoes them is the familiar stuff of human folly: denial, hubris, ego, wishful thinking, poor communication, lax oversight, greed, deceit…it all adds up to a failure to execute'.
The misguided concept of trying to be 'in control' of communications suggests that as long as communication 'spin' creates the desired impression, then everything will be hunky-dory - regardless of the reality that lies beneath!! By the way, this article was published some weeks BEFORE the WorldCom meltdown, and suggests to me that all is not well in a world that manipulates controlled perceptions to do its dirty deeds. The other side of this particular coin is that people also see exactly what they want to see. For example, investors always want to get the maximum return on their investments and dare I say it - their greed is a driving force in determining what they want to see.
To support this - in the same article, Boston College sociologist Diane Vaughan notes: 'people don't usually surrender their mental models easily…they may puzzle over contradictory evidence, but generally succeed in pushing it aside - until they come across a piece of evidence too fascinating to ignore, too clear to misperceive, too painful to deny, and which makes vivid still other signals they do not want to see, forcing them to alter and surrender the worldview they have previously so meticulously constructed'. The combination of companies that want to tell the story 'their' way, and consumers who want to hear it (in a manner that suits 'their own' justifications) is a lethal one indeed. It is no surprise to me therefore that in the so-called land of the free where 'rights' have largely superseded 'responsibilities', when something like Enron and WorldCom happens, the marketplace screams for the heads of the managements concerned - whereas they themselves should perhaps share some of the blame….?
The second item is a great book that I recently discovered called 'The Myth of Excellence' by Fred Crawford and Ryan Mathews. This book is based on research carried out by the authors whilst working with clients at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, and is a veritable eye-opener. There are a number of absolute gems in this book and besides not wishing to fall foul of the copyright laws, I simply cannot try and replicate all of these in this column. You need to get your own copy, and read it with a clear and open mind.
The book opens with a great quote from Mark Twain: 'It's not what you don't know that hurts you…it's what you 'know', that ain't so…' Crawford and Mathews preface their book by describing that it took some 3 years of dedicated research, 'that jolted us out of our personal smug assumptions about the nature of business. What we 'knew' about business was keeping us from seeing the changing realities of commerce.'
What they discovered was that across the globe, and across all industries, businesses are spending billions of dollars sending poorly aimed - and in some cases offensive - messages to their customers and leaving literally billions more on the table each day. Instead of talking to customers in a language they can understand and find meaningful, most businesses are actually demonstrating - through their advertising, marketing, merchandising, product assortment and selection, transactional terms, and service levels - that they don't respect or even know whom they are doing business with. The bottom line: Global business - and perhaps even more important to you, your business - is inexorably, and unknowingly, marching towards a crisis point.
The authors suggest that management tends to focus on the 'wrong' things and as such, tries to 'control' outcomes rather than provide conducive environments, or stand for something important to customers. ' …Misdiagnose a problem and you almost inevitably misdiagnose the solution. Because businesses focus on 'increasing transactional value' rather than 'nurturing sustaining relationships', and on 'increasing the value of a transaction' rather than 'worrying about the values surrounding the transaction', they almost intuitively adopt strategies aimed at becoming the best at every aspect of a transaction - an approach that leads to a lack of enterprise focus - which in turn, confuses and alienates customers…'
And the final word from this fine work: '… as this book was going to press, it was estimated that advertising spending (in the United States) would reach $233 billion level. Yet, by any objective measure, that spending is increasingly less and less effective. Why? Because the core message of most advertising is focused on price and on product features and functions - rather than on the development of a balanced message of content and context. Too much advertising is concerned with creating transactions rather than building relationships, and emphasises value over values. In short, it mirrors all the mistakes being made by businesses…'
As always, I recommend that anyone who makes, or who plans to make, a living out of the business of commercial persuasion in the future, should get a copy of this book - and please don't let what you think you 'know' about this business influence your understanding of the warnings contained in this book. …'til next time.