Focus group flaws

Tony's been writing of his first time experiences of focus groups - two in one week. He comments:

I attended my first ever advertising focus group - a virgin audience member.
Fascinating! We watched batches of TV adverts, rated them in real time on a handheld turning knob, and then answered some questions on each batch. I have to laugh. I don't know what they do with the information, but the whole process seems so deeply flawed.
Firstly, it is so apparent the difference between a "good" advert and an advert which might actually sell something. We had to rate for both together. So there was no room for nice advert, wouldn't buy it. There were a few of those questions on the written feedback where we could rate the advert highly but not the product. Secondly, there's a huge difference between rating an advert in a focus group and seeing it at home on TV. I reckon from tonight and playing with my knob, I could formulate an advert which would do very well in a focus group but means sod all in the real world.

(His blog entries are here and here.)

I've run plenty of focus groups in my time and Tony's comments are a salutary reminder of their many pitfalls.

Communities of Practise

Further thoughts arising from my day in Brussels...

Miguel Cornejo gave an interesting, and touching, presentation on his experiences with Communities of Practise (CoPs). These are big in the world of Knowledge Management but may be jargon to others. Miguel is a quietly-spoken but powerful advocate of CoPs.

He explained how he created these online communities to support, for instance, HIV and AIDs sufferers. He creates different levels of access and anonymity so that sufferers can express their feelings freely whilst its also possible to maintain the standards of advice given and appropriate professional credentials are needed in some areas.

One of the most powerful ways in which this works for people is in acknowledgement. (Something I've blogged on before here.) Simply having a space to share experience, to speak and be heard in confidence, has a powerful positive impact for community members.

There's plenty of talk in Knowledge Management about knowledge as something to be transferred, but I loved Miguel's valuing of ackknowledgement. There was a lot more to his presentation than this - I'll link to it when the conference papers are published.

Verna Allee

I'm just back from Brussels where I took part in the conference "Knowledge Sharing in Networked NGOs" organised by Olaf Brugman in his role as NGO specialist at Knowledgeboard.

This was a cracking day. A room full of engaging, passionate people who seemed to really care about the subject we were discussing. There is just no substitute for conversation with people who like to share ideas and explore new possibilities, rather than make thinly-veiled sales pitches.

First keynote speaker was Verna Allee author of The Future of Knowledge. Verna says

The value network perspective makes it abundantly clear that success today is all about relationships. We sometimes are dazzled by technologies and what they can enable us to do. But the bottom line is that business is about exchanges and transactions that happen between real people. Even when people never see each other or speak directly, only real people can make decisions and initiate action. Technologies may fill the role of decision-makers at times, but only based on what a real person would do.

When business is viewed as a linear process, a set of functions, or simply material transactions, it not only diminishes the role of people - it makes invisible the all-important human relationships. The value network focus puts people back into the business model in such a way that every individual can see who they need to be in relationship with, and what their responsibility is in that relationship.

(Read more of this good stuff in this excerpt from Verna's book).

No seriously, go read the extract.

I found Verna very cheering and optimistic. Great to hear someone articulating so well the need to understand that value today is being created in ways that conventional accounting can't really hope to measure.

She touched on the topic of "Social Network Analysis" which basically means creating diagrams of organisations based not on the official hierarchy but on the actual contact made between people - where the real conversations take place. Such work often shows that the real energy in organisations is in webs that bear little resemblance to the formal structure. Verna explained how the dot.com survivors were often characterised by having very strong social networks with multiple stakeholders - creating engaged conversations with them long before any money ever changed hands. Cisco innovated socially creating these connections long before the money started to churn. Oooh, great stuff this.

Other gems from Verna:

"We're living in the middle of a huge barter economy that we've ignored" - ie many exchanges are taking place that don't involve money changing hands... "asking how to put a dollar value on knowledge is asking the wrong question."

Processes are not the active agents. People are.

What's interesting about companies is not what makes them alike but what makes them different. Conventional accounts show companies as if they are the same; intangibles are what make them different.

Thanks Verna for a brilliant and inspiring presentation.

Update Further conversation with Verna prompts this clarification of the above. She comments:

One challenge in the work I am doing is to distinguish value network analysis from social network analysis. Social network analysis only deals with simple directional arrows so it cannot get at these core exchanges that I feel are important to understand in able to draw the economic and business linkages. While social network analysis is a truly wonderful methodology it is inadequate to address the particular questions that I am asking. (Just as my methodology would be inadequate to fully describe a social network.) The intangible exchanges in a value network diagram would not describe a social network, only those relationships within a business or value network.

If I've (now) got this right, value network analysis means trying to figure out what are the relationships that have the most impact on value - perhaps not the same as the most gossipy which might show up as big fat arrows in social network analysis.

Funny this. Regular readers (well I hope the plural isn't too much hype) will know that I have a horror of diagrams most of the time, but these ones that attempt to show networks really intrigue me.

Personalising

This comment from BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis...

Media is getting personal

Perhaps it's as simple as that. Media was institutional. Now it is personal.
By personalizing media, I don't mean customizing it (My Yahoo, Your Yahoo, All God's Children Got Yahoos).
I mean humanizing it, taking on the personalities of people, not of institutions.

...reminded me of a chat with a friend the other day. We discussed how in marketing, the idea of personalising a letter means sticking the respondent's own name in it. But what really needs to happen is for the person writing the letter to put themselves into it. Take responsibility for its content, and have it come from a human being, rather than as some bland marketing broadcast.

King Looie Katz

Paul Goodison's been blogging about Tim Kitchen's chapter from Beyond Branding. He picks up on a Dr Seuss quote, which has reminded me of another great Seuss reference, this one cited by Tom Heuerman:

Dr. Seuss wrote of King Looie Katz, a proud king in the world of Katzenstein. King Looie was especially proud of his royal tail and did not want it to drag on the ground and get dirty. So he commanded Kooie Katz to walk behind him and carry his tail. All was well until Kooie realized that his fine tail was dragging in the dirt. His pride was hurt. So Kooie made a cat named Chooie follow him around, and Chooie Katz kept Kooie's tail from dragging on the ground. On and on it went until all the cats in Katzenstein were hiking round and round all keeping one another's tails from dragging on the ground. They felt proud to be so special except Zooie Katzen-bein who was the last cat in line. No one was left to carry her tail. Zooie was awful mad, and she did a brave thing. She yelled, "I quit!" and slammed the tail of Prooie Katz on the ground. Then all the other cats did the same thing until each cat held its own tail. Since then the cats of Katzenstein have been more grown up and democratic than before. All movements to new realities begin with individual acts of courageous authenticity.

Fabulous stuff! It's all too easy to wait for other people to take risks... for me, some of the best moments come when I risk speaking my deeper thoughts or feelings.

Heroes...

Tony has been blogging on the subject of Heroes. His first nominee is Linus Torvalds - he quotes this paragraph from coverage in Wired:

Torvalds is a work-at-home dad with no formal management training. He confesses to being terribly disorganized. His approach to voicemail is to let messages stack up and then delete them without listening to any. His memory is so lousy that he can't recall whether he was 6 or 8 or 10 when his parents divorced. And he's awfully absentminded: We are heading out the door for lunch when Torvalds suddenly remembers that his wife is out and that if we leave, his kids will be home alone. Then there's his ambivalence about his role as Linux's leader. "I don't have a five-year agricultural plan," he says. "I don't want to dictate: This is how we're all going to march in lockstep." Yet the 12 years he's presided over an unruly group of volunteer programmers is worthy of study by those who teach leadership inside the world's finest MBA programs.
....Once you start thinking more about where you want to be than about making the best product, you're screwed."

I like this.

This coincides with the arrival of the latest pamphlet (Personal Leadership) from Tom Heuerman, always a thought provoking read. He writes:

Our traditional model of leadership looks for the hero to lead us in times of chaos and crisis. In his book Leadership James MacGregor Burns described heroic leadership as a relationship between leader and follower in which followers place great faith, often unfounded, in the hero's ability to overcome obstacles and crises. The followers avoid personal responsibility by projecting their fears, aggressions, and aspirations onto the hero as a symbolic solution to the conflict inherent in transformation.

Heroic leadership is to be distinguished from The Hero’s Journey I mentioned earlier. The Hero’s Journey expands the spirit of the traveler and of those impacted by the Hero. Heroic leadership, on the other hand, ultimately diminishes the spirit of the leader and the follower.

I like this too! The theme linking both pieces is the idea of humbleness rather than grandiosity. I write a lot about brands, and most of them try, very unconvincingly, to be heroes and disappoint. So much management writing blathers on about excellence and is full of exhortations to greatness, but I feel this too is another variation on the same theme. What Torvalds seems to embody, if this quote is anything to go by, is an ordinariness that contrasts dramatically with the PR of most fabled managers.

Upcoming events

I've always really enjoyed speaking in public. Don't know why, just do. So I'm chuffed that a couple of interesting events have come up for me recently.

Yesterday I caught up with Olaf Brugman on the phone. Olaf is organising a workshop for NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations) in Brussels on 29th October, and he's invited me to speak on the theme of Trust. Olaf is the SIG Editor for NGOs at Knowledgeboard.) We had a good chat about the issues NGOs face - and they turn out not to be so different from those most other organisations have: a lot to do with how to find ways to collaborate effectively when there is a prevailing climate of doubt and distrust.

I love talking about trust even though each time I do, I realise how elusive a concept it can be.

Then this morning I got an email from David Hunter from the American Marketing Association Toronto chapter. They're going to hold a panel event on November 7th to talk about Beyond Branding. I'm in the city for the Improvinbiz Conference anyway, so I'm going to have a chance to talk about the book there now. Cool.

Great conversations...

I met Paul Goodison yesterday along with my Beyond Branding co-authors Tim Kitchin and Malcolm Allan and fellow Medinge Group member Luke Nicholson. (The Medinge Group is the think-and-do tank that gave rise to the book). It was a great conversation which Paul has blogged here and here in a very flattering way. As he says, I am a lover of great conversation, and yesterday turned into one long rolling conversation.

After Paul left, the rest of us stayed on to kick around ideas for the next Medinge Group meeting in Amsterdam. This led to all sorts of exchanges about how we work together, what helps us to collaborate and what stops us collaborating more. We all took turns to "speak the unspoken" - my hot theme at the moment, and as usual this made the talk more exciting and useful. Anyway, we've pencilled January 16th in the diary and I'm expecting it to be another first-rate event.

Sky High Airlines

Jay Allen's blog linked me to SkyHigh Airlines a spoof site with the motto "Flying More, Caring Less". Nuff said. Turns out to be a promo gimmick by Alaska Airlines.

So now I'm published

I popped over to Kogan Page yesterday to pick up my own copy of Beyond Branding. (It's quite handy that my publisher is a 10 minute walk from where I live).

So now I'm a published author for the first time. Even if only the published author of one chapter! It's a strange experience... I'm not quite sure what I feel, though I'm telling myself I should feel something.

Anyway, I've anxiously re-read my chapter and not found any typos in it and feel... pleased with it. I like the book as a whole, it's not a conventional "how-to" marketing tome; it's more of an attempt to interrupt conventional marketing thinking by people who have worked inside marketing and accept that much of the No Logo criticism has justification.

And now I'm working on an idea for a book with Tim Kitchin where I'll be able to say more. We're working on a theme of the importance of mutualism, an effort to break down the rigid roles of buyer and seller in favour of a more collaborative way for stakeholders to engage with each other.

Spam comments and the power of community

I've just started to suffer from Spam comments, the latest effort by these wretches to publicise their sites. They basically post fatuous comments to weblogs, with links to their sites. I've only had two or three of these so far, though it's clear from other blogs that there is a rising tide.

As this abuse starts, the community of bloggers starts swapping notes and solutions are invented. Now some guy I'd not heard of called Jay Allen is building a plug in for MovableType (my chosen blog software) that will create a slick mini-database to trap and block such comments. There's even a facility for trusted bloggers to collaborate to create blacklists and filters to block the spammers.

Great stuff, and an example of how a community with loose ties creates and protects itself from abusive elements - without the need to go to law.

Yoga selling Cereal

Thanks to Paul Goodison for picking up on this BBC story on The Tyranny of Yoga.

Yoga helps us to get closer to enlightenment. I wonder if this insight from the St Luke's agency counts as an example?:

It is a reliable medium through which the advertiser can communicate with the Special K demographic.

Makes you proud to work in marketing,eh? According to St Luke's agency, yoga has been used to sell...

Air Wick air freshener
Norwich Union Direct insurance
Benecol low-fat yoghurt
Cable & Wireless
Clear Blue pregnancy test
DFS and Homebase
John Smith extra smooth bitter
Special K cereal
Phostrogen weed and moss killer lawn feed

I'm with Paul when he comments

Those companies/agencies using the Yoga image aren't being authentic because they are selling something that isn't the truth. Eating a breakfast cereal is not going to make me supple or relaxed.

Marketing, diagrams and despair

Earlier this week I attended a debate on the proposition "Marketing isn't Working". Like all such adversarial set ups, it tended to revolve largely around semantics, though some contributions were insightful and entertaining. Including those by my Mutual Marketing collaborator Jennifer Kirkby and Beyond Branding co-author Alan Mitchell. (Sorry, shameless plugs I know).

But I came away intensely depressed by one of the speakers whose presentation revolved around a definition of marketing as (and I paraphrase)

"The management process of creating shareholder value by building trusted relationships with high value customers."

When I hear stuff like this, I panic. I think, oh my god, is that really what marketing is? Is it really as dessicated as this? If so, I'm in the wrong trade.

Then to make matters worse he presented a diagram with loads of boxes, quite a generous allocation of arrows and lots and lots of jargon. With a long red arrow going back from the last box to the first.

Now let me be clear, some of my best friends like diagrams. But I nearly always hate them, and I certainly hated this one. Incomprehensible, jargon-laden and fatally reductionist. The worst of all worlds, too complicated for anyone to really understand in a presentation, yet woefully clumsy, reductionist and simplistic as a description of the great mysteries of what makes human relationships work.

Perhaps long ago this guy was an enthusiastic young marketeer, full of entrepreneurial drive. Now , sadly, long since ground down by the infighting and politicking of business, reduced to deeply unconvincing recitations of mantras about Shareholder Value. Look! Shareholder value, as measured by the stock market, oscillates on a daily basis and seems correlated as much as anything to the success of the England football team and the wildly fluctuating moods of the addictive and workaholic City traders. The stock market says shareholder value is down about 40% compared to a few years ago - but marketing hasn't suddenly become 40% less effective!

To enslave any business process to that sort of casino strikes me as dispiriting, no matter how often businessmen nod in its direction.

And where does such a definition leave people doing marketing for charities, NGOs and other non-profits? Who often achieve remarkable success without any reverence to the notion of Shareholder value? It certainly can't account for the delightful marketing success of things like the Resolution! dance festival I've blogged over at Mutual Marketing today.

And what about Society? Which has more than its share of people who aren't anyone's "highly valued" customer and don't get a look in on this miserable definition?

Anyway, my despair has now gone away because I realise that this dreary stuff is, well, SOOO twentieth-century. There are plenty of people with a far more exciting, entertaining and engaging idea of what marketing is and can be. And I think, at least hope, the future belongs to them.

Speaking the unspoken (2)

And that last entry reminds me of another story from last week.

Some friends and I met a magazine publisher and editor last week to talk about potential collaboration. At least, that's what we hoped we were going to do. We meet in a coffee place and it's just one of those weird meetings where I just feel uncomfortable from start to finish. The publisher seems like a woman in big hurry and her editor seems a bit stressed too. They treat the meeting as an exercise in explaining to us how to write articles with lots of facts, with a peremptory attempt to find out what we actually do.

We ask what they thought about a recent article one of us published; they make a few remarks which I translate in my head as "err, we haven't read it".

So it's a crappy meeting really. And the moment they leave us, we all agree we hated it. Pity none of us did much about it at the time.

Anyway, we decide that instead of just moving on, we'll write a letter saying that we didn't feel inspired by the tenor of the meeting and wish them (genuinely) well as, despite this, we all really liked their magazine. Another decision to speak the unspoken.

This letter prompts a fairly patronising reply that accuses us of "not having fully researched how to pitch an article to a magazine" and protests that it was a special treat that they bought us coffee as they were very busy and don't normally meet people this way.

On one level, oh dear, what have we accomplished by this exchange except some hurt feelings all round. But on the other hand, I think we did well. It's no good talking authenticity and then practising only bland politeness. And we have genuinely learnt a lot from this exchange about how our intentions were interpreted. And the next time something like this happens I'll say something at the time - and probably in a more constructive and friendly way.

Many of us - myself included - have a phobia about conflict. But I'm finding more and more that conflict can be hugely instructive. And conflict avoidance, whilst sometimes prudent, can often block learning and lead us to settle for a more humdrum existence.

Speaking the unspoken

I've been thinking a lot about what goes unspoken in the world in general, and in my little slice of it in particular. There I go, thinking again, but I have been doing a bit of doing too, honest.

Anyway, there I am on Friday sitting with my mate Tim Kitchin. (I would normally say "friend" not "mate" but Tim likes to assume a sort of mockney persona when talking to me for some reason, so what the heck.)

We're meeting to talk about the next step towards doing a book together about humanising business. Tim's full of good plans and I'm nodding approvingly and staring out of the window of Waterstones bar in Piccadilly, telling myself to make enthusiastic noises and ignoring the fact that - for whatever reason - this afternoon I just don't feel like I want to write a book, or at least talk about it. Finally I cop to what's happening. "Tim, for some reason, I don't know why, I'm just finding it hard to engage with this subject today."

So now instead of a phoney conversation about a book, we start having a real conversation about what's actually happening. And you know what? Suddenly my engagement shoots up and we start to have some real contact. Now Tim starts to voice his concerns about how we're going about this and we share our doubts and worries and puzzles about each other.

With the unspoken, spoken we make what feels like a more convincing plan of what to do next. And paradoxically, by giving voice to my lack of engagement, I become engaged.

Ooh err. Who would have thought it?

Denham Gray on the unspoken

No sooner do I finish my last blog than I stumble on Denham Grey's eloquent thoughts:

Wonder if you can really capture tacit knowledge by mining digital text, e-mails, blogs, IM scripts and bulletin board posts? - I think tacit knowledge is something deeper it needs proximity, large bandwidth, immersion and social realtionships to be acquired, appreciated and adopted

Another reason to get out more!

Denham continues

By most estimates, the largest part of organizational knowledge escapes awareness, notice and conversation, it slips beneath the collective radar, avoids codification, escapes validation and remains undiscovered by traditional knowledge mapping activities. In standardizing knowledge, processes and language, firms may strive for a strategy that is superficial and achieve a shallow security.

Many times key knowledge which imparts competitive advantage does not come from formal explicit, codified stuff such as patents, trade secrets, documented industrial processes or insightful leadership memos, rather the key knowledge comes from socialization and collective practice.

I love this stuff. I am so weary of consultants peddling their clever processes which often trample over the subtle stuff that goes on, unnoticed and often unvalued, between human beings. That's why, when push comes to shove, I avoid using NLP approaches and put more effort in just being fully present to relationships.

Thinking or Doing?

I spend too much time thinking.

A friend revealed to me recently that he would describe me to acquaintances as a brain on a stick. He assures me that this was a compliment. I'm not so sure.

And much as I like blogging and all that goes with it, the problem is that it takes me further into the world of the concept. Of course, in some ways I'm happy there but the truth is real human contact is a lot more fun. And I see that Tony has connected to the insight that blogging either makes you fat or makes you broke; or fat broke as he calls it.

Then Olaf's blog leads me to comments by Lilia Efimova on the theme Communities Don't Practice.

This in essence suggests that "Communities of Practice" aren't much use because they are all talk. On the other hand, teams which do things are better at doing, but don't spend enough time reflecting in order to improve their learning.

How true this is of people and groups. We either like to make stuff happen, and fail to learn; or we theorise and fail to do. The first types think they are practical and the others are nerds; the second think of themselves as rather clever and the others as simple.

Maybe a little more balance would be in order. Which in my case means getting off my butt and getting out a bit more. Most of all, my recent trip to Jersey reminded me that I really thrive on real human contact and engagement. And there's only so much fun to be had thinking about stuff.