Philip Granof is CEO of Protobrand, a next generation communications agency headquartered in Boston. Follow him on Twitter at @ pgranof or visit his blog.
Last month, I learned what Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist must have felt, surrounded by the mysterious creatures and unknown dangers and forced to edge ever closer. On my right was in full costume as a cute, someone equipped and somehow huggable, green hammerhead robot ... in a dress. (I later learned that she was in the dress of a Japanese video game character of Katamari Damacy.) At a table in front of me was a young man who just received a free copy of Far Cry 3 for letting Ubisoft, the gaming company, his head shaving with a mohawk. Fans of the game also received permanent Far Cry inspired tribal tattoos. Yes. I said permanent. This digital inspired menagerie was PAX East the largest gaming conventions in 2012, a North America this year in April held and attended by tens of thousands of dedicated gamers.
Staring at this mash up of Mardi Gras and the bar scene from the first Star Wars film, I realized my traditional marketing background had left me feeling unarmed behind enemy lines. As I repeated to myself, "Black hawk down. Black hawk down, "I prepared to find coverage and from a new plan of the battle to work. Then I hesitated ... I was really in war? Why did it feel this way? The four p's of marketing felt like collateral damage, but perhaps war was the wrong lens through which to this new world.
Nilofer merchant marketing recently declared dead. After an insensitive panegyric in her recent blog post suggests Merchant marketing replaced by what they shared goal calls it. Through shared purpose, Merchant explains, "you have the basis on which to participate in a community. You talk no longer in humans; Co-you create with people. " Sure, I was in the primordial soup of co-creation while at PAX, but I was witnessing the death of marketing?
The real power of the concept of shared goal is not that the marketing, but rather can replace something deeper. It changes the linguistic reference framework for marketers, to help better to understand their part in the array of co-creation of consumption. As enemy combatants, we will never succeed. So what we need is not better armament, but a shift in the language of the marketing to once again give a voice. If we can agree on something like marketers, is that words have power. (We just don't want to admit that the effect they have on us.) Is it possible after all that marketing is not dead, but the unspoken metaphor behind it is?
From birth people Enter a culture-language field that encourages the blinking away from certain aspects of reality to focus on others. In their groundbreaking book metaphors We Live by, showed George Lakoff and Mark Johnson the ability of ordinary language by metaphor to shape our reality. Metaphor is the auto focus for what linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf called the "kaleidoscopic flux of impressions" of our world. To prove their point, Lakoff and Johnson dissect the language of argument, for which they become the dominant metaphor in Western culture war displaying:
Your requirements are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I scrapped his argument.
I've never won an argument with him.
All this seems so natural for us. It is almost an axiom of constructive discourse. Exposing the metaphor effect, the authors have imagine a different metaphor: argument is dance. Suddenly, our mind shift and we see a process in which time is shared by both sides ... Oops, I mean performers, who produce something in concert.
I'm really not responsible for viewing marketing as war. Society is debt; that is to say, marketing society. One need look no further than an Al Ries and Jack Trout the bestseller, positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. It is the clearest example of the metaphor, marketing is war. Our language is in argument, as a rallying cry:
We take aim in our target group.
We capture or defend market share
We want to get shelf space.
We fall to competition.
We win customers.
In the world of co-creation, marketing must be a new metaphor — one that embodies the notion of shared purpose. What if we replaced the art of war with a finer effort? Let's say: marketing is dance. In this paradigm, customers are not prices, nor the spoils of war. Customers, and even competitors, are willing partners with whom a company according to a shared melody moves.
Martha Graham said in dance there is a vitality, a life force, "an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique ...Dance is the expression of humanity — the landscape of the human soul. "Graham sees dance as part of the human condition, in which there are forward connection, discovery, transformation and revelation comes.
We marketers need to be more like Martha Graham and less like Carl von Clausewitz; more choreographer than strategist; more dancer than soldier. As such, we should ask new to understand how to participate in the performance:
How does my brand connection — social, philosophical, functional — with others in the co-creation matrix?How does appreciate my brand, and promote the individuality of each person in the co-creation matrix? We create a journey of discovery for self-identity of the person?What is the nature of the change that takes place for people in the co-creation matrix? Who are they before they enter, and how are they different?How is the change to himself and others revealed? It Is anatomical, behavioral, or psychological? In fact, answers to these questions of a mark shared goal statement, and serve to replace that years of child of war: the positioning statement. As marketers, we cannot remain observant anthropologists. It is also clinical. Nor can we remain cloaked in foxholes while we develop a new plan of attack. We should go indigenous and learn the local dance. It all starts with a simple jump to left.http://bit.ly/JOlYLb
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