How - Dov Seidman [73]
If the company is a stadium and its workers fill the seats, the gates to the field have been thrown wide open and anyone can now wander in, look up, and watch how you do the Wave. They can see who is leading and how they are leading, who is or isn’t following, how section 38 communicates with section 52 and what they say. The way the outside world now views a company has irrevocably changed, and this new framework of understanding has profound implications for the way business is conducted in the twenty-first century. Now, HOW you do WHAT you do matters most.
THE MARKET DEFINES YOU
Nowhere in the internetworked world is our changing relationship to proxies and surrogates better illuminated than in the world of advertising. Advertising and marketing are proxies as well, up-front representations of a company’s best effort to reach out to its customers. Back in the early days of radio and television, when advertisers broke free of the printed page and began to employ images and sound, ads were by and large conversational approaches to the consumer, an attempt to replicate the experience of everyday life. People talked about things to one another, and those who could appear more sincere, more folksy and down-to-earth, were often most successful. Ronald Reagan, for example, then a B-movie actor, would come on the radio and tell you in his relaxed tone how Boraxo Waterless Hand Cleanser would clean everything from paint to grease from your hands. “The whole crew swears by it,” he said, “and so will you.”16 Messages were simple, informative, and direct.
As television grew in popularity, people began to realize the power of the image and manipulate it accordingly. Decade by decade over the next 40 years, ads became slicker, images more polished and manipulated, and commercials more frequent and overwhelming as marketers attempted to perfect methods to define their product identity in the market. The era of folksy friends evolved into the world of abstract icons. The Marlboro Man, Colonel Sanders, Joe Camel, and even real-life characters like Michael Jordan for Nike became highly evolved and crafted symbols representing the feelings and aspirations of consumers. Powerful “brand image” became the marketer’s goal, with “brand awareness” following close behind. By the 1990s, brand messaging had become so abstract and sophisticated that the product itself often became less important than the image or associations that our most talented marketers could wrap it in.
The connected world is changing all that. Easy access to information makes consumers smarter today; they can easily get past the image and get to the truth of a company’s product. In the United States, movie marketers were one of the first groups to feel this. Twenty-five years ago, the biggest movies of the year would open on a few screens in New York and Los Angeles, and then, buoyed by positive word of mouth and the praise of critics (themselves surrogates for the audience), would roll out across the country week by week, with foreign markets to follow. According to the Los Angeles Times, top box office hits made just 12 percent of their total gross in the first week of release.17 With the growth of the cineplex and the introduction of the wide release, studios became able to flood the market with their product, opening on thousands of screens on a single day around the world. Since only critics and a scattered few test audiences around the country actually saw a film before it was released, movie