Neil Perkin describes two contrasting talks about Fast and Slow in Marketing. Adam Morgan shares some interesting examples of businesses that thrive on speed:
a 2014 Harris Poll.. found that 90% of respondents… expected real-time customer service from brands and as many as 48% expect that services will be delivered before they order them. ‘Uber’s children’, said Adam, have different expectations, wanting everything at the speed of Prime. Speed is, increasingly, money. A tenth of a second delay in page load time on Amazon is equivalent to a 1% sales decline. Organisations are focused on doing more with less.
Fast can be great, but an awful lot of organisations seem in a permanent state of “doing more with less” and I feel a lot of concern about that. Morgan goes on to explore the ups and downs of creating speed and, as he puts it, reducing drag.
The second talk was from Martin Weigel, expanding on his post about kicking the marketing crack habit with some great examples of the toxic effects of rush and short-termism in planning.
He began by talking about how we live in impatient times, and how we’re naturally biased to favour short-term gain over long-term (what psychologists call ‘temporal discounting’). This happens not only at an individual level, but an organisational one. Whilst management is pre-occupied with what is happening over the next three months, McKinsey has shown that between 70 and 90 percent of a company’s value is related to cash flow which expected three or more years out. The tenure of CEOs is becoming ever-shorter (in 1995 it was just under ten years amongst the world’s largest corporations, in 2009 it was just six). 95% of S & P company profits are spent on share buy-backs and dividends according to Forbes. The average agency-client tenure has reduced to around 3 years. The average tenure of a football manager in the premier league is heading towards a single season. Half of video viewers stop waiting for a video to load after 10 seconds.
Weigel goes on to look at some longer term, more sustainable principles for business, worth checking out.
I think a side-effect of living with the internet, building on an existing culture of high stimulation, is that we are in danger of becoming so anxious that our actions are driven increasingly by panic and short-termism. We end up operating at the pace of computers rather than the very different capacities for changing speed in our biological heritage.
Part of what gets lost is the value of changes of pace, and fluency in acceleration and deceleration. I keep coming back to unhurried as my personal mantra, to capture the flow state we can reach when our pacing and synchrony with others is most satisfying. It’s not always slow; a well tuned Formula team servicing a car in a few seconds is going fast but is also, in its way, unhurried, everything is timed to co-ordinate.
Unhurried is not about being laid back and ignoring the deep fears and problems our world presents. It is about finding a way to meet them that is serious but not rooted in panic.
Hat tip to Lee Ryan for steering me to this.
