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Well, we never knew you cared.
Or rather we knew you cared, but didn’t know you cared so much about
strategy that you’d bother sending us abusive emails in response
to our strategybitch e-missive last December.
Fair enough, you weren’t agreeing with everything we said. Nevertheless,
the arguments, insults and, yes even the odd grunt of approval, made us
think it was rather pleasant doing something from the heart of our little
community – and so we decided to make the fatal mistake of repeating
ourselves.
Strategybitch 2 contains more ideas drawn from our experiences with clients,
this time looking not back but forwards to the next few years, and asking
what 21st century business will look like. We hope you enjoy it. And for
those who like a fight, by the way, the letters are at the end.
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SPRING 2006
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PEOPLE-SHAPED BUSINESS
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We all know that old business models were about controlling power
in organisations by controlling knowledge, and new ones are about
empowering people by sharing it.
But how many organisations have changed their vision of customer
and employee relations to fit the new model?
Buildings and information systems are still based on the model of
machines, ordered not by the way people work best, but by what best
serves the machine, or “system” as we call machines when
they are comprised of human beings. The British Library, for example,
alienates users because it is built for books, not people. A library
may have to be like that – but do businesses?
Don’t they work better when you begin with the people and work
outwards from there?
This isn’t about empowerment programmes or away-day initiatives,
but an entirely new way of structuring human relationships at work.
Those of us who think our workplaces have come to terms with all
this might ask why, when absenteeism is a problem, we employ people
to look after PCs but regard healthcare schemes as added benefits
rather than utilitarian business aids.
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TRUE BELIEVERS
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The next big breakthrough in business will be about simplicity –
finding ways to do complex things in simple ways. And people-shaped
business should unleash simple behaviour that would enable this.
For example. In those old business models, the hidden costs were
plant. Outsourcing has reduced that, and now the hidden costs are
from simply doing business – the lawyers, management and admin
that ensure things happen. How do you reduce that?
Well, trust would help; just imagine doing business in a world
where everyone’s word was their bond. That this could be seen
as a business proposition rather than a whimsical notion is demonstrated
by ebay’s feedback system, designed to create a global, virtual
version.
Creating versions that work could be a challenge for the 21st century,
although there may also be some personal soul-searching to do. How
well would any of us do in a world where integrity mattered more
than lawyers?
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IF YOU LOVE THEM, SET THEM FREE
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On the other hand, consumers are realising that being loyal to brands
is a mug’s game that lays you open to abuse. Even football supporters,
those last defenders of unflinching brand loyalty, mutter about it.
Rather than worry about this, perhaps we should bite the bullet and
DISCOURAGE brand loyalty; what better incentive could there be for
focusing on improving business and products?
They always say people let themselves go after marriage; maybe business
needs to keep itself permanently on the dancefloor. |
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NEW CONCEPTS FOR A NEW CENTURY
NO 1: DOUBLESHOP
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| Publicly opposing a brand while continuing
to use it selectively, as in “No, I don’t shop in
Tesco but I did buy my telly there.” |
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YOU AND ME, NAKED
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The old idea that you are or have a brand that is ‘delivered’
by your people is creaking and splitting at the seams.
Consumers are challenging brands, attacking whiffs of fakery in
blogs, on websites, and with very smart consumer activism. For examples
look here or
here or here.
The consumer is getting inside brands now – but some successful
brands are embracing this. Look at how Apple leverages its user
community to create award-winning tech support forums, or how Sony
Playstation endlessly develops websites that use input from its
users.
The paradigm shift is from brand-transmitter/consumer-receiver to
you and me making the brand.
It means that we must rethink organisations around a new image:
two people, facing each other, very close together, talking easily
– and stark bollock naked.
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THE BINARY REFINERY
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Old politics thrived on a binary morality which had poverty, good,
community and socialism on the one side and wealth, evil, individualism
and capitalism on the other. It was a recipe for keeping the evil
rich in power.
Good business now recognises that the centre is a good place to
sit while you pick and mix ideas from the whole circle. Consumers
– particularly those born after 1980 – no longer expect
seamless ethics built on binary oppositions; brands can select a
particular set of “good” points without worrying about
coherence. Look at Tesco again – ever so nice when it comes
to employees and people who buy things from it, allegedly less so
with those who sell things to it, or try to enforce planning guidelines
for the local community.
The important thing is that regardless of what people do and do
not like about pick-and-mix brands, they do not complain about inconsistency.
And a good thing too; it means ideology stops getting in the way.
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PANACEA FOR DIE-HARD BINARISTS:
SOME CLASS DIVIDES FOR THE 00S
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| People who like James Blunt and people
who hate him |
| People who are too busy and people
who are too bored |
| People who use MSN messenger and
people who can’t work it |
| People who watch ITV drama and people
who don’t |
| People who can make a physical object
and people who can’t |
| People who make lists and people
who think lists are pointless |
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THE NEW NICH-ISM
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We have traditionally seen niche brands as moppers-up for consumers
left unsatisfied by the big players – but a new generation is
challenging that.
The new nichists pick off one small part of a big brand portfolio,
and simply do a more radical and interesting version. Think Google
versus Microsoft, or small fruit juice techno-artisans versus Coca
Cola.
The new nichists tend to get media exposure beyond that merited by
sales (Apple, remember, still has only 4% of the personal computer
market) because they have twigged the mass media’s interest in
extremes.
An extreme is a story; it suggests something that has not existed
before, and is therefore news. Of course this presents an opportunity
for business, but it also presents problems because as PRs, politicians
and pressure groups learn that extreme positions guarantee airtime,
it creates a sense of news coverage and reality diverging ever further.
Journalists are behaving immorally here, but in a way you can’t
blame them – they think the public needs entertainment as well
as information now. This is partly because in recent years the brands
that relied on just being there for you, for the predictable, sensible
non-choices, are waking up to find that sensibleness has run off with
a younger partner, and is now wearing trainers, driving a flashy second-hand
BMW, and sending postcards back from its safari holiday in Africa.
And meanwhile the new nichists are working on new schemes to titillate
it – not necessarily thinking ‘what can we do that's new’,
but ‘what can we steal and do better?’ |
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NEW CONCEPTS FOR A NEW CENTURY
NO 2: SELF-SUBVERSION
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| Taking the globally-approved ads
too bland for your market, and spinning them. See JWT’s addition
to the Indian ads for Kingfisher beers (“Number One beer in India
despite this ad”) and the energy drink that made an x-rated,
viral MPEG version of its own TV ad. Allegedly. |
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NEW CONCEPTS FOR A NEW CENTURY
NO 3: DEAD SEA COMPANIES
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| Undynamic business, typically an
outpost of a larger concern, where employees have little individual
accountability, actions seem to have no consequences and those seeking
to deal with problems tend to be seen as disruptive. |
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BACKLASH CULTURE
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Business increasingly finds itself thrust into positions of social
responsibility, but can these new mix and match ethics help with
big issues?
We were made curious about this when someone in a group pointed
out the disparity between an age in which women’s increased
earning power means that business is targeting them more and more
– and yet simultaneously many of the last two decades’
advances in social justice are now being rolled back as part of
Noughties Backlash culture.
Despite advances in areas like the mass media and child custody
law, rape and abuse are on the increase, the conviction rate for
both is lowering, and 1970s-style depictions of women as sexual
objects have returned.
As business gets drawn into moral areas, one 21st century question
will be – how far can it engage with issues like this? Apple
recently got burned when it used a picture of Rosa Parks on the
bus in its “Think Different” campaign – objectors
pointed out it was easy to try to join the winning side after the
event, but Apple steered well clear of any contentious politics
in the 2000s.
For our own part, CSC regrets that the West has to have a competitive
model for the relationship between the sexes anyway. The relationship
between men and women is at the core of creation, and we all know
that to get completeness you need the yin and yang of opposites.
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WE WANNA TELL YOU A STORY
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The way we pick and mix ethics can tell a story that is far more powerful
than a brand; in fact “Stories not brands” could be a mantra
of 21st century business. Stories imply substance, and these days
brands are always telling us they want to go for substance not badges.
But the story-brand ends in trouble if it doesn’t keep its story
alive and relevant. Look at the co-operative movement; it invented
the modern supermarket, and ought to have virtually owned the organic
and fair trade trends.
But it seemed to abandon its bigger story when the other supermarkets
took its practices and abandoned the principles. It didn’t ask
what the new version of the co-operative dream was, and in the end
that new version was forged by others – from Ben & Jerry,
Innocent and Waitrose to Matalan and TK Maxx. |
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NEW CONCEPTS FOR A NEW CENTURY
NO 4: LYING BY PERCENTAGE
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| Is an improvement from 50% to 65%
really an improvement, or an indication that 35% is still unimproved?
Good business sees the 35% as a problem to be solved until it is 0. |
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NEW CONCEPTS FOR A NEW CENTURY
NO 5: OPPOSITISM
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| Branding that draws on the opposite
of your products’ attributes – Mastercard’s “Priceless”
ads, Persil’s “dirt is good” line, Orange’s ads
telling us that good things happen when our phones are off. |
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READERS’ LETTERS
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We must admit to being a bit taken aback by the number of e mails
we received on the subject of “Middle Class Revolt” in the
first strategybitch, and would just like to say that we were not asking
for sympathy for the middle classes – just suggesting
that their loss of faith in their corporations to deliver a trustworthy
life structure effected a significant shift in their values.
So we can AGREE with the reader who said “The suburban middle
classes are still very much with us, firmly entrenched, with a new
set of badges and values for the noughties… The gradual downslide
of the working classes into an amorphous underclass has created more
clear blue water for the middle classes to paddle in.” But as
for the one who said “Oh poor them… one’s heart bleeds
at the thought of them having to go through what everyone had been
through ten years earlier” – well, that was the point we
were trying to make. And to the person who said that we were “navel
gazing middle class dilettantes” of the kind that led to the
creation of new labour, we say can’t you leave us alone? The
poor old middle classes get the blame for everything. |
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| ©2006 The Cambridge Strategy Centre www.camstrat.com |
