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| “At the end of the day, marketing is a form of education. You need to grab the attention and imagination of your potential buyer, and then inform them on your offer, working with both their logic and emotion to make a decision to choose your company over others.” |
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instantly almost anywhere. And marketing departments must fully appreciate how this works, adapt to it, and work with it. Your customers may know more about certain aspects of your company than you do. The same is true with your recruits. As such, a successful marketing organisation must fully understand, and then represent, the true nature of their organisation. To do anything to the contrary simply comes across as disingenuous, making the marketing group look like the “designated corporate liars.”
How fast does this information move? For example, just over a year ago, I delivered a speech at Syracuse University, in upstate New York. It was a moderately sized audience of about 100 people, and I shared perspectives on the flat world economy. A few hours later, at the reception, I looked at my BlackBerry. On it was a note from an associate in Chennai, who was taking issue with a point I had made in my speech just three hours earlier on the other side of the world! It was a truly global and transparent moment. (It turns out a reporter from a local newspaper wrote a story on my speech, immediately put it on the paper’s website, which was then picked up by Google).
You must approach your job with the assumption that “everybody knows everything.” As such, you need to speak to the market – particularly potential clients and employees – not in the patronising ways of the past, but with a very human voice in a peer-based manner. These people are out there in the blogosphere, continually researching you, developing a full picture. To not speak to them in a similarly candid and human voice is to be discredited.
Flat World Marketing
The flat world is posing significant challenges to marketing departments. After all, in a firm that has a global reach, how do you communicate in a style that is clear and compelling across myriad cultures? In short, can you craft and convey “culturally translatable” messages?
This is harder than it seems. At the end of the day, marketing is a form of education. You need to grab the attention and
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imaginationof your potential buyer, and then inform them on your offer, working with both their logic and emotion to make a decision to choose your company over others. This needs to fit within their personal patterns of learning – and that’s where the challenge resides.
For example, as an American with deep experience in India, I’ve learned that the fundamentals of the American and Indian educational systems are quite different. That is, the American system (with a liberal arts bias) tends to be very “tops down,” in that students are shown the concept or the general picture, and then start to investigate the supporting detail (if they wish). On the other hand, the Indian system (with a bias towards math and science) is more “bottoms up,” in that students learn the fundamentals (in great detail) and then – with that foundation – work their way up to understanding the entire system. As such, simple messages (which often leverage metaphors) work well with American customers. On the other hand, more content-rich (and to the point) messages work well with Indian customers.
For example, look at the websites of Accenture (www.accenture.com) and Satyam (www.satyam.com). These are both successful and respected companies in the same industry, but their marketing approaches are very different and reflect their cultural roots. The Accenture website takes the American approach (leveraging Tiger Woods as a golfing metaphor for business performance, utilising pictures and containing precious little content). Satyam takes the Indian approach (where the homepage is very text-heavy, full of content, and very straightforward without leveraging imagery or metaphor). These are global firms that have erred on one side or the other with this global challenge. There are many other examples in many other industries – and as a marketing leader, you must be aware of how your customers learn and then communicate to them in that manner.
Get a (Second) Life: Leveraging New Technologies
As a final point, we are in the midst of a fundamental transition in individual |
