I first heard it approaching the lake on my morning run. It was a “whoop” but I couldn’t place the sound.
A couple of hundred feet later I heard it again, along with the sound of Canadian Geese. As I approached the hill leading to the dam I heard it again, and now I was able to identify the source.
A woman standing on the side of the trail facing the lake. In full view of everyone for a good hundred yards, dancing, literally, like no one was watching. And I mean she was feeling it! Legs and arms in full motion and every so often an outburst she couldn’t hold in.
As I approached her, I began to smile. I could also see others smiling as they passed her in the opposite direction. Smiles created by a woman putting out nothing but unadulterated positivity. Rounding the corner of the lake I heard her again and the smile returned. I thought here is a person who has figured it out.
She’s found joy by blocking out everything else going on around her, focusing only on the beauty of the lake in front of her, and being completely consumed by the feeling of her music. She was in the moment, her moment.
I think we all could use a little more of that, I know I could. What a great way to start the day. Rock on my friend. Rock on.
It’s a good question given the current uncertainty of our world. When will the economy reopen, what will be the impact, and what should we do about it? To gain better insights into what might be, Carbon Design went back and looked at what clients were focused on during the “Great Recession”. Looking at projects from 2007 to 2010 Scott found 5 interesting trends across industries, 3 which he wrote about in the article,WTF Do We Do Now. In the webinar, Scott will share the research behind the article, insights from 30+ client projects, and how you can use this information to help form your marketing, sales, and internal efforts.
Watch the webcast for insight you can use to gain a competitive advantage:
No one had to say it because we all felt it. After months of research, repositioning the organization, and refining the messaging it all blew up in less than a week.
With the global pandemic in full swing, I’m sure this scenario is playing out across organizations around the globe. Whether it’s relating to sales goals, marketing budgets and/or anything in between they have all been blown to hell.
So what do we do now? It’s a great question that so many of us are struggling with currently. To help answer it I went back into the archives to see what projects clients were undertaking during the “Great Recession” of 2007. Here’s what I learned.
Repositioning and structural change – I found companies using the downturn to reposition themselves in the market – shifting from product to services, from product focused to customer focused, etc. It was a structural change as well as a change in positioning. Be prepared to see new competitors coming into your industry once the economy recovers…or, it could be your organization entering new markets.
Fixing the infrastructure – running hard for the last 10 years created very little time to fix basic problems, especially related to the revenue engine. A slowdown is a perfect time to fix the things that can create greater efficiency coming out of a recession. An investment in this area produces a ROI that only gets better over time. Look at the quality of the database, opportunities to leverage AI, better tracking and performance solutions. This requires an investment in time and focus that is rarely found in good times.
Refining the value – It’s not the value proposition, it’s the entire value package. You can count on one thing for certain about the future. Customers will have to, or will expect, more for less. Don’t get caught flat footed, prepare now to deliver more value for the money. If not expect to 1) be undercut by competitors, and/or 2) take a hit on your profit. If you can’t figure out how to build in new value then figure out how to deliver the same value for less.
In challenging times like these the first reaction is basic survival. And for many that may be the case for the foreseeable future… as a small business owner I feel you! Many of the plans you’re making now are built around business viability, but soon there will be light at the end of the tunnel. Keep in mind, the items I’m suggesting will take at least 16 to 20 weeks to plan, develop and execute.
I understand it may take all your time and energy to ride the storm out, but keep your eyes on the horizon. Good luck, we can do this!
The beginning of a new year can be a perfect time to pause to reflect on all the things in life and business that have shaped us over the past 12 months.
For Carbon Design, 2019 was a year of interviewing amazing people, making bold observations about sales and marketing, and predictions on what’s coming in business.
Join us as we look at our readers’ favorite posts of 2019.
#1 Do We Need Outbound Sales Anymore?
Our CEO, Scott Gillum, joined the Gartner’s Sales & Marketing Thought Leader Roundtable where he posed the question, “Do we really need outbound sales anymore?”. This question sparked a lively conversation that continued well after the meeting.
#2 Scott’s Interview with Carlos Hidalgo, Author of “The UnAmerican Dream”
When asked who the book was written for, Carlos stated,
“I wrote it from the perspective of an entrepreneur and a business owner and a professional. But it’s really a book to say, stop. What is the frenzy for and reassess your personal and professional relationships and define success on your terms.”
#3 Unlocking Growth by Learning How to Message to the Value Chain
https://vimeo.com/329172662
“Who invited marketing to the sales pitch?” It was said in passing, and intended as a joke, but the marketing team got the point.
The comment was made in a recent messaging workshop. The head of sales expressed his frustration at the messaging being developed by marketing. His point — there was nothing different. It sounded like the same sales pitch they had been giving customers for years.
“The odds of it happening are 1 in 1500 or .0007%, about the same odds of being randomly selected to come onstage at a concert hall. Similar to Courteney Cox being pulled on stage by Bruce Springsteenin his iconic Born in the USA video, of course without the scripting. And now that I’ve dated myself, yes, the odds of this happening increase with age.”
Read on more on Scott’s ill-timed detached retina- and the lesson he learned during his forced downtime.
Follow along in 2020 for more tips on marketing, business, and thinking differently delivered directly to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter at www.carbondesign.com/subscribe.
Recently, I published an article with a provocative observation. While much attention has been devoted to the need for organizations to adopt Artificial Intelligence as a core capability, we should consider an even-more-pressing need for “artificial empathy.”
If you did not read part-one, I’ll retrace some footsteps here. The corporation is a creature of human invention. But the creature has grown so enormously in its size, capabilities ,and power, that we the people now encounter a diminishing sense of agency for ourselves and an increasing sense of agency for corporations to shape our future on issues including privacy, equality, safety, the environment, and the behavior of public institutions that once governed these things. Not to mention the stuff of everyday experience: stupid IVRs, impenetrable clam-shell packaging, and infuriating password implementations, just to name a few.
The ramifications of this observation extend beyond marketing strategy. But still, people who think deeply about the relationship between people and brands will play a role in how this narrative unfolds.
And here’s why: In our fast-thinking minds, we perceive the brands that stand for corporations as if they were other people.
Now, people – except for sociopaths – are naturally empathetic. And moreover, we expect them to be so. When we sense a sociopath, the hair on our neck springs, and adrenalin shocks our bloodstream.
As social creatures, we are born pre-wired with miraculously-adapted endocrine and neurological systems that reinforce our empathy in a positive feedback system known as friends and family, community and kin. But corporations are not born with anything of the sort.
Do you see the problem?
At least in our hearts, we have an expectation for brands to behave in a way that they are poorly equipped to fulfill. Expectations disappointed are brands diminished.
Organizational scale amplifies this problem. (We all know what “faceless corporation” means.) So does the doctrine of maximizing shareholder profits. Are there signs that both society and corporate leaders are beginning to discern that the corporation has gained such power, that the power needs to be matched with greater empathy? The recent “statement of social purpose” by 181 corporate leaders suggest this might be so.
The question is how? Some people who read my first post may have been under the impression that I had a plan for how “artificial empathy” could be created. Rest assured this was far from the case. I’m sympathetic to the aspirations of the customer experience movement, but I’m skeptical those aspirations are advanced by continuing to ask socially clueless questions that amount to: “How do you like me now?”
Still, having once stumbled upon the problem of artificial empathy, it’s tempting to speculate. So, with apologies for pairing a ten dollar question with nickel and dime answers, here are some preliminary thoughts.
Biomimicry
If you’re familiar with the literature on biomimicry – you will know that many industrial inventions begin with the observation of patterns in nature. Could we re-conceive the information systems used by corporations through this lens?
In that case, the challenge of “artificial empathy” would cause us to think about a system involving a sensory apparatus, a cortex that integrates the signals from the senses, real-time feedback, amplifier mechanisms and so on.
It does not take long to see that analogues for each of these things already exist within the information systems of corporations – but what’s lacking is an architecture marshalled by the imperative of empathy.
For humans as social creatures – empathy is essential for survival. Embracing the biomimicry idea in an IT architecture geared to artificial empathy would mean that the selfish subjectivity of the corporation would need to be subjugated to human experience and dignity. Do we have engineers this creative and leaders this courageous?
Philosophy
There is a branch of philosophy, “epistemology,” that deals with the question of how we know what we know. Historically, for corporations, and indeed any large organization, to operate at scale has required that an internal representation of customers and prospects is shared across the organization. Sometimes this internal representation goes out of date. Sometimes it is simply wrong-headed from the start. Invariably this internal representation is reductive.
Done well, the disciplines of customer segmentation and personas offer steps in a journey away from the most reductive internal representations of the corporation’s publics. But too often in practice, people mistake the map for the territory. In a product-centric world-view with no imperative for empathy, mistaking the customer map for the territory is standard operating procedure – “best practice” even. In a corporation seeking to attain the capacity of artificial empathy these old habits must die.
While corporations have raced to hire data scientists and put them to work on the analysis of customer behavior and customer responses to various stimuli, they have not been as quick or adept at hiring and training people in the discipline of keeping separate the map from the territory while the study of people is underway.
The pairing of these disciplines feels important going forward. Data scientists are in demand now. Data scientists with a flair for philosophy will be the rarest and most valuable of all.
Artificial Intelligence
Setting aside the semantic arguments about the existence of AI, we now can access algorithmic tools that can explore data-sets to find multiple features of interest about people, and discover patterns of difference, similarity and prediction that are more subtle than those derived from averages, demographic co-variates, single-touch attributions, and the other mainstays of traditional customer analytics.
Indeed, if we are going to operate with less reductive representations for people, and if we are going to simulate the biological mechanisms of empathy within a corporation, artificial intelligence may be the disruptive game-changing technology that finally enables meaningful progress against a problem that has been building for some time.
Final Thoughts
None of these answers by themselves is a prescription for artificial empathy. The confluence of all three may point in a worthy direction. Still, some journeys are worth taking, even when the destination is distant and the route uncertain.
This might be one.
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By Glen Drummond Estimated Reading Time: 3:00 minutes
Does the competitiveness of your product, or even the success of your business depend on someone else changing their mind or practices? If so, then here’s an instructive tale.
Louis Pasteur
This name, you probably know. Historical reports indicate that by age 55 Louis Pasteur was considered a national hero of France. He won an impressive series of honours and awards for his pioneering work – perhaps most important the germ theory of disease – a theory he developed in the period between 1860 and 1864.
Ignaz Semmelweis
This name most people don’t know. In 1846, Semmelweis was appointed to lead the obstetrical clinic of Vienna General Hospital. In 1847, he got to the bottom of a horrendous (35%) mortality rate from “childbed fever” – drawing a link between doctors performing autopsies and then attending to birthing mothers without first disinfecting their hands.
In his 1861 book, Semmelweis presented evidence to demonstrate that the advent of pathological anatomy in Wien (Vienna) in 1823 (vertical line) was accompanied by the increased incidence of fatal childbed fever. The second vertical line marks introduction of chlorine hand washing in 1847. Rates for the Dublin Rotunda maternity hospital, which had no pathological anatomy, are shown for comparison (view rates).
In the span of one year presiding over the maternity ward, Semmelweis established both cause and cure – instituting a regimen of physicians handwashing with a chlorine solution. Semmelweis conceived and implemented hospital infection-control procedures resulting in dramatic clinical improvements – a full 15 years before Pasteur. And he actively promoted his findings for all to see.
Fifteen years later, Pasteur basked in glory for his achievements in the understanding of the cause and control of infection. Semmelweis was ignored by his contemporaries, who refused to adopt his infection-control procedures. Semmelweis became despondent and his life deteriorated into tragedy. What’s the difference?
The course of a person’s life does not reduce well to a theory – but the course of an idea’s progression in society is a worthy subject of study. Some good ideas have a hard time breaking through. And conversely some bad ideas catch on and linger. What’s interesting is that in this case we have almost the same idea – but in one case it catches on, and in the other it does not.
So what is the difference? One clear difference in this case is “Framing.”
Semmelweis saw that the behavior of the doctors (performing autopsies and then attending to mothers giving birth) was causing the mothers to be infected with “childbed fever”.
He theorized, and then clinically demonstrated, that a change in doctor’s behavior (handwashing after performing autopsies, before attending to living patients) could sharply reduce maternal mortality. Do you see the framing problem? In order to get doctors to stop killing mothers, they would have to admit to themselves that their past actions had been killing mothers. The frame generated a headwind of cognitive dissonance.
Pasteur was not necessarily a more gifted clinician. But he was certainly a more gifted framer. He recast the narrative of infection, shifting attention from the practices of the doctor to the “infectious agent” – the pathogen or “germ.” Semmelwies invented infection control. Pasteur invented a signifier to represent a signified that was already, but only, implicit in Semmelweis’s clinical innovation.
From the standpoint of clinical procedures, there’s nothing in the germ theory of disease that would cause Semmelweis to act any differently in his own clinic; nothing that would improve upon the results he obtained. But from the standpoint of convincing other doctors to change their practices, the germ theory of disease was far more effective than Semmelweis’s call for doctors to change their practices.
We can draw a lesson from comparing the accomplishments of these two men. We may draw a contrast in our mind between the “real” work of innovation and the “fluff” of representation, but to do so is to mis-recognize the way people respond to change.
Inventors who wish to gain attention for tangible innovation should not ignore the need for a new frame to go with it.
It’s not unusual to find companies referring to their relationship with clients as “partnerships.” It’s common to find client logos on vendor websites. But how often do you see an agency or consulting firm’s logo on client websites? If you visit www.evepark.ca – that’s exactly what you’ll see.
Carbon Design, represented side by side with, a global architecture powerhouse, a world-class designer, and the project principal: the innovative green-tech engineering firm, S2E Technologies Inc. Under S2E’s leadership, these firms are inventing a new consumer category – one that integrates bold new ideas about housing and transportation – and radically resets the carbon footprint of both at the same time.
CASE STUDY
Did you know, that until recently restaurant owners only cared about the cleanliness of the food prep area? Most customers, and owners, assumed that if someone got sick after dining out it was because of food poisoning. That was until Carbon Design and Challenger Inc. helped “challenge” the norm by showing owners that half of the outbreaks in a restaurant were caused by people to people transmissions.
Now owners know where the “hotspots” are, and as a result, restaurant are cleaner than ever. Grab your face mask and enjoy a safe night out, but you may want to avoid the raw oysters 😉.
CASE STUDY
How do you do it? By giving clients and users what they want. Using the remaining budget that was to be used to update the site with the new branding we designed and built an entirely new site on a new platform. But audience needs are constantly evolving so the work never stops. Our team continues to audit performance and make improvements.
As a result, the two-year journey has paid off with the site being named #1 in the industry. Even more importantly, their key priority areas (site search, attorney profiles, etc.) were ranked in the outstanding category. Proving that excellence is a journey not just a destination.
