Customer Crossroads

Can marketing save the world?

A startling factoid has been circulating in social media: Did you know that the crowd scenes in top-grossing movies are more than 80% male? This came from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, launched out of concern over the impact of gender stereotypes on her children.

Perhaps these stereotypes are a by-product of the Hays code, enforced in Hollywood from 1934 to 1968. Based on a belief that film could be a powerful force for the “improvement of mankind”, the code prohibited, among other things, depictions of sexuality, childbirth and methods of smuggling.

Today, obesity, eating and food are major topics in public policy discussion. Food culture is diverse and fascinating. We have raw food advocates, gluten-free advocates, eat-for-your-blood-type advocates, and even food porn. We carry our coffee cups and water bottles around and snack freely anywhere – behaviors not tolerated in the past, when coffee breaks were scheduled. The type of coffee you drink, whether you make it yourself and with what device, all say something about you, your values, and your aspirations. Cooking advocates see home cooking as a path to family bonding and a better society, as well as healthier eating.

School boards are attempting to change dietary habits by controlling cafeteria menus. Without creating a compelling experience of healthy eating, these efforts have been relatively ineffective, a predictable result to any marketer or marketing researcher.

The public pays for poor health outcomes in many ways, so has a vested interest in good health outcomes. This territory is ripe for regulation, and we have already seen many signs of this, from labelling requirements to ingredient regulation.

If we want behavior change on a large scale, we have options:

• Forcing people to eat apples instead of pre-packaged apple products is one idea.
• Another is to deny processed apple products the right to market themselves, a strategy that proved very effective with tobacco.
• A more intriguing idea, to me, is to help the healthy food compete on a level playing field with better marketing resources.

Culture in our modern era is not monolithic, it is continually shifting around us. We engage in dozens of daily choices about the right way to be and to live, about achieving success, and what kind of success we should aspire to. We spend our lives in the creation of ourselves.

Learning how to influence our culture for the greater good without resorting to the Hays Code is one of the challenges of modern public policy.

More food for thought:

CBC Ideas program on this topic, in two parts, called Stuffed Part 1 and Stuffed Part 2.

Can you brainstorm over the phone? Yes!

When I was invited to a 90-minute brainstorming conference call for a not-for-profit organization I belong to, I confess I dreaded the meeting.

Until I learned that the brainy and skilled Laurie Tema-Lyn would be facilitating over the phone. (Laurie's book, Stir It Up!, is a great source of facilitation "recipes")

So of course it was a very productive session. Here's what I learned:

[1] Brief introductions are helpful so that we can all know the other voices who are speaking. In this case, there were 12 on the call, many of whom I knew already, but not all.

[2] Set up ground rules. Among the ground rules were to start with creative stems like "How could we" or "I wish we could," instead of rambling, apologetic time wasters like, "Well, this might not really be a very good idea..."

Another ground rule, mostly honored by breaking it, is to let other people know when you are finished speaking by saying "Done," so others can jump in.

[3] Get people off to the right start with a simple exercise to get them talking. In this case, Laurie asked us about creative fundraising approaches we had seen in other parts of our lives. There's really no wrong answer to a question like this, and it is so much better than saying, "Okay, who has an idea to share?"

[4] As the facilitator, acknowledge those using the right approach, provide lots of encouragement, and change the topic when the ideas start to dry up. (All things one does in face-to-face facilitation, of course.)

[5] Before the meeting, send out some helpful tips, and a 10 minute simple advance exercise. This was tremendously helpful, actually, as I knew what to expect, and had also mentally started brainstorming on the topic even before we started.

I personally would have liked having a shared screen showing all the ideas being typed up. Or having a chat window to use to add all the things rushing around in your head in between getting to talk. (But that may just be me... I have idea traffic jams pretty regularly.)

Think how much more productive your own office meetings and conference calls would be if a little active facilitation skill was used?  This point was beautifully made by Marc Solby in his article Facilitation First Aid.

What are your telephone brainstorming tips?

What happened to the telephone? permission media redefined

Something strange is going on with phone calls. It has become some kind of non-permissioned media.

The phone used to be a great tool for connection. And it still is, of course. We can talk, and be face to face if we want (Skype, etc.) across great distances and across time zones.

So why aren't we using it more?

Here's what I think is happening with communications media.

Point 1: We are all overloaded. Keeping up with communications is a major job. I've seen estimates that people working can spend a quarter of their day on e-mail. My take: they're showing a lot of discipline to keep it down to a quarter.

Point 2: The advent of social media meant that there are a bunch of new channels you are supposed to keep up with, either reading, or posting, or both.

Point 3: E-mail has turned out not to be a permission channel. People can get your address, and they do. Heck, we all do it. To the extent that having even a quarter of your recipients open your bulk e-mail is good. Just unsubscribing is a chore. Nope, it's not permission media. We sign up to get something, thinking to ourselves, "I'll unsub later", and then resenting having to unsub. And suspecting that half the unsolicited e-mail, the non-personal messages, were never requested or permitted at all.

Point 4: LinkedIn, and perhaps Facebook, are aiming to be the ultimate permission channel. You can't communicate if you aren't linked. Unless you pay for the privilege of course. Which could be their downfall if abused.

Point 5: Between the random digit dialing and the list selling and the sales calls, answering the phone has become something less than fun. Companies actively avoid releasing contact information. Not phone numbers. Not e-mails. Not even physical addresses! (I go through this challenge every year when I try to send physical holiday cards.) And who can blame them? Because we have created this monster called the script, and the sales call, and it's not the value-added message it's supposed to be.

Net result: Even though we want efficient communication (which the telephone certainly can be), we are collectively into the habit of walling ourselves off, of trying to shut down some of the communication. So we try to isolate and manage through e-mail, which initially seems faster. Of course it isn't, we all know that. You can spend a lot of time on e-mail resolving something easily resolved in a brief conversation.

A corollary to this little problem is voice-mail. How I used to love it, and how I hate it now. (Dear Skype, I don't want video voicemail. Seriously.)

We are all overloaded. So we are trying to isolate .... no buffer ... ourselves. And in the act of buffering, we have made things less efficient than they could be. Phone calls seem to be one of the casualties in this war for time and attention.

It all means ... that your well crafted marketing message, your amazing script ... is just ticking people off. We are all still working the sales funnel when we know the funnel is gone, gone, gone. It also means that we are all becoming seriously stressed out over the overload in communication. Or is it just the overload of messaging?

Where this could all be going ...

Have you read The Circle yet, by Dave Eggers? It's an interesting, rather creepy take on the end game of social media. A bit far-fetched, but also creepily and eerily familiar. I recognized my own obsessive checking of things. And the difficulty of getting productive work done when interrupted a gazillion times a day (by myself mostly) to check social media, e-mail, or something else.

What if we really had permission media?

If we really had permission media -- if you needed my consent to e-mail me -- what would that mean about the quality of the messages? What if the same thing were true of all communication channels? Interesting little thought experiment I invite you to try.

Personally, I'm resolving to try to make my communications more pertinent, more relevant, and shorter. And I swear I will try to pick up the phone more often.

How about you? What's your take on all of this?