From The Head Of Zeus Jones

Was talking with Mark recently who shared a quote from a former professor of his that I really like: “Strategy is the art of finding the unfair physical advantage.” While lots of other quotes talk about strategy as an abstract or invisible thing I love the fact that this acknowledges that strategy is tangible, real and can be touched. By extension, it follows that strategy depends upon physical assets and characteristics such as size, strength, arsenal, etc.

This is why strategy is not transferrable from one company to the the next, I’ll post a presentation about that shortly. However, the less obvious implication is that strategy is also not transferrable from one kind of marketing to the next. The clearest example of this for me is the difference between communications strategy and (for lack of a better term) modern brand strategy that is concerned with defining how brands behave.

Comms strategy is concerned with simplicity and focus. Complex strategies are extremely hard to communicate well, especially in cluttered media and so strategy for comms is largely an art of editing, filtering and sharpening. The goal is to put all your weight behind a single thrust. Here the physical metaphor is helpful because it shows that communications strategy is about precise targeting and strength.

On the other hand, modern brand strategy is about the smart use of all your assets, as a result, modern brand strategy tends to be complex and layered. Modern brand strategy can also have complex goals: the creation of a partnership or two-sided market with a former competitor, the reshaping of a category, and so on. These things can’t be achieved through simplicity and focus, they require balance, speed and creativity.

Technorati Tags: communications, complex, modern brands, simple

Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eole/

I watched a bit of Ken Burns’ Unforgivable Blackness this morning about Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champ at the turn of the last century in America, (it’s really good). Johnson was a part of the “New Negro” movement; blacks who opposed the segregation theories of the day espoused by people like Booker T. Washington, and who rejected the idea that blacks should be submissive. It was radical thinking for the time that instantly made everything else look and feel old. Watching, I got a sense of what a revolution it must have been at the time.

I got the same feeling watching Germany demolish Argentina. The tactics and play of the “new” German team felt so fresh and revolutionary that, by contrast, Argentina looked old, sluggish and predictable. New Germany were, in fact, so good that they sent two of the greatest footballing nations in the world home to rethink how they play the game.

I think “Being New” has infiltrated a broad spectrum of business and culture. There is a fresh aesthetic, and a fresh approach that can often be identified in the most unexpected places. Often it’s still too new to have been named or classified, but it is unmistakable because it instantly shines a harsh light on being old.

Technorati Tags: modern, new, newness, old

About four years ago, we started having the conversations that ultimately became this company. We talked about the massive changes in our industry. We talked about the changing role of advertising, the changing nature of brands and the impact of technology upon culture. Most of all, we talked about the idea that all of these changes had set the stage for a transformation of marketing that is reshaping much of what we do and how we do it.

Our conversations were probably like many of yours. But we happened to share a mutual belief that marketing could and should be broader than the output of a creative department; and that agencies – locked in the frameworks of a communications industry – were by and large incapable of re-building themselves around the new world while simultaneously profiting from the old.

And so we started Zeus Jones. A company built from the ground up to serve the new world of marketing and modern brands that are emerging. Armed with equal measures of naive idealism and the desire to create a real separation between us and what saw as the “old, failing world of marketing,” we created sharp divisions around what we would and what we wouldn’t do. Around how we would work, and around how we would not. Around what we believe in and what we don’t.

We defined our company around these beliefs and they drove everything from our workspace, our staffing, our “pitch,” our contracts and our processes (or lack thereof).

Our beliefs are not a product of the business, they are the business.

Because above all else, we are in business to put our money where our mouth is. To prove that our beliefs are strong enough to build strong brands; to prove that they’re strong enough to support a company.

In the early days we used to (half jokingly) refer to our philosophy as “sales prevention.” We confused or scared off many more clients than we kept. But slowly we managed to convince a few of the crazier ones to sign up, and now, three years in, we find ourselves in the enviable position of working on a bunch of amazing projects with amazing people. So many of them, in fact, that we are growing.

And so we are now looking for a very senior strategist to become part of our team. An extremely important hire to fill an extremely important role.

The right person will be a keen thinker and practitioner of modern marketing and will share our desire to help to shape the tools and the direction of modern marketing. They will be a smart, strategic business thinker who is also fluent with technology. Someone who can lead client projects while also being a mentor within our company. Because we don’t write briefs, nor hand off strategy to a creative department, the right person will be comfortable with an extremely fluid process where strategy and creative are often the same thing. They will be equally skilled at creating a strategic framework for ideas, as well as helping to create the ideas themselves.

The right person is a great presenter and is likely respected within the industry. They will share our love of strategy and our ambition to do strategy better than anyone. And they will be an extremely important part of helping us realise that goal.

But most importantly, the right person will share our beliefs about marketing and about brands.

Because those beliefs continue to drive our company and shape the decisions we make about what we want to do and what we don’t want to do. And because of that, because we have literally built this company around those beliefs, the right person will also understand, as I do, that this is the best strategy job in the world.

So if you are that person, or think you might be that person, I would love to speak with you.

Adrian

Technorati Tags: jobs, strategist, strategy, Zeus Jones

Image via mr. nightshade

The story of the startup, founded upon a philosophy of making money while doing good for the planet is so common now that it has become archetypal. This story traces its roots directly back to the grassroots environmental movements sparked by books like Silent Spring. This is just one more telling of the story of David over Goliath, or of the 300.

However, I think that this newer story has taken an unexpected turn in the last few years.

At the start of the environmental movement, the enemies were institutions like big business and big government; the heroes, individuals and small groups. Action took the form of protests, or small heroic acts to advance understanding of the issues or to orchestrate protection of valuable resources.

However, as our collective understanding progressed, and we learned more about the issues, it became increasingly clear that the problems were larger than we had imagined. Science has revealed that the “enemy” are not institutions per se, but rather that the “enemy” is mankind as a whole. And by and large, the majority have embraced “the message,” but individually we often feel powerless and insignificant.

It’s not surprising then that protest and small acts of heroism are being brushed aside in favour of more sweeping, large-scale changes, reforms and actions. Actions that, by and large, can only be contemplated and executed by the old enemy – the institutions of big business and big government.

I think that this has created a surprising turn around, which I alluded to in my post on setting the agenda in business and marketing. Where sustainability was formerly a strategy for small companies to create disruption in markets dominated by larger companies, I think that it is now primarily a strategy for big companies to create even more distance between themselves and the competition.

In moving from being a strategy of creating awareness to one of creating action, I think that “sustainability” has become something against which only a company with scale and resources can make any meaningful progress. What do you think?

Technorati Tags: action, big corporation, green, mission, small company, sustainability

I am currently sitting in the back room of a focus group, listening to potential customers disembowel react to a number of new product concepts. One of the fascinating themes which keeps on coming up is the “fact” that the concepts in question:

“…must come from a big company, because a small company doesn’t have the money to do research like this.”

We have moved fully from the era of marketing research into the era of research as marketing.

Technorati Tags: focus groups, research