Re-building your business around a renewable resource.
A little while ago, I did a bit of thinking and writing about how the fundamentals of branding were firmly rooted in industrial age thinking. Over the past couple of years I’ve also come to realise the same is true of most marketing and business strategy. While the majority of businesses in first world economies are now based upon services and not tied to physical resources or laws, most business still operate as if they were entirely bound to finite resources.
A (still staggering) example of this for me is in the media marketplace. We all know that TV ratings have been declining for eons and most normal people (i.e. non-marketers) would therefore assume that the cost of buying a TV spot would have decreased. However, as many of you know, the reverse is true. The cost of many spots has actually increased because they are bought on a CPM basis and as there are fewer M’s the C’s are larger.
This makes absolutely no sense to anyone except for media property owners who are treating attention as if it were a finite and diminishing resource. This is so clearly wrong it’s hardly worth discussing, yet there are still billions of dollars spent by otherwise reasonable people in propagating this myth. Attention is finite in any given period, but it’s finite in the way that grains of sand on the Earth are finite. As Clay Shirky points out, we haven’t come close to tapping the full power of people’s attention, so why are we acting as if “Peak Attention” happened in the 80s?
I think it’s because people haven’t yet examined the basic assumptions upon which they and their businesses are operating. Unless you happen to be in an information-based category, it’s entirely possible that no competitor has forced you into re-evaluating things and therefore your category can go about its business fairly unconcerned with the fact that so much has changed. I think this must be quite a nice life for the kinds of people who like that sort of thing. There’s a calming predictability to it all and you can operate every day as you did the day before, half asleep.
However, it’s equally certain that some day in the not too distant future, someone somewhere will wake up your category and those businesses who are still operating on Industrial age principles will be in trouble. Conversely, I also believe there’s a ton of opportunity for many companies to truly break out by taking a long, hard look at their beliefs and practices. How can you change basic economics of your business? How can you re-think your business from a finite materials-based model towards an infinite imagination-based model? I think these are the kinds of questions business and marketing strategists need to be asking themselves today.
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Tags: industrial age, networked age
