What the leaders of tomorrow can learn from planners

I have found that planners across a number of different marketing companies can often play the middle man between departments in trying to drive change which in turn is trying to drive a favourable outcome for all. I find myself doing this a lot lately with a lot of the strategic techniques actually playing out on internal and external stakeholders more than the actual strategic work on the audience at hand. I was lucky enough to get a lot of the awesome Russell Davies and his view of shepherding people through your thoughts. Which I have used a lot

The truth is that it can often feel a bit lonely. It can often feel like you are an outsider as you can see it like white on rice, but getting everyone to break away from their area of expertise to understand the greater thought can be freakin hard work. I feel often my days are spent playing people and not actually concentrating on what I am here to do.

But here is a video that a guy in the states put together which I got from conversationagent about how a key player in the US military tried to change the strategy in Iraq. Its interesting to show the generalist nature of the key person and how he is somewhat empathetic and understanding of each party in order to bring them together. I think it will be quite interesting to have these key skills in leadership on major and minor organisations in the future.

They shouldn't be called marketing directors anymore...it should be.....

Tea Cup Ride, originally uploaded by Molly J Online.

..... Experience Directors

I have over the past year or so become a huge fan of the experience designers within digital agencies. People like David Armano over at Logic and Emotion and the guys from Adaptive Path

have great blogs and a huge following. The way that these guys talk about brands from within a digital sense, I believe goes well beyond a website or web experience and is how we should all look all areas of communications and marketing. The way they truly bring the user into the for and address their needs and desires, which leads to greater experiences. If you look at the term marketing in the dictionary it comes up as...

'the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.'

I feel like this is a little old and with the world changing as it is. Marketing will become a more important part of the overall business. But in every area of the industry we talk around the term of the brand experience and its about time that clients started taking this seriously internally.

The Experience Economy is a great book that talks about creating an experience around a product. In a world of product parity creating an emotional experience around your product can allow people to truly identify with you and allows you to stand out from the crowd... or as I prefer to put it... stand out for your crowd. I always ask the question, would Disney be the same without Disneyland.... would iPod be the same without iTunes. This is packaging up an awesome experience around a product and adding services to give a great overall sense of the brand. These companies are run by the question... how good is the customers experience. This can longer be for theme parks and technology companies.

I truly believe that marketing departments should be run by an 'brand experience person' at the heart of the business and their review every single day should be. ' have I made the brands experience better today'. The guys at adaptive path pulled out some interesting research from Bain and Company that showed 92% of marketers believed they had a superior customer experience (this was towards digital or the website) vs the 8% of the audience that believed they have had an awesome customer experience. That is quite a gap.

The truth is that the digital experience role has a number of key specialist skills that I think will be crucial in the future of marketing. They know data. This hasnt even been touched properly yet or its complete role in the process of marketing. Its not for the boring people. It will continue to grow in importance. They have empathy for their audience and in turn have created research techniques to identify and build on this. They understand brands. They understand digital and what little, simple experiences can add to the positive or negative sentiments toward your brand. David's view on Microinteractions... is not just about the web. Its about everything a brand does. They can communicate and collaborate with designers and techies. This may sound weird. But with a move to everything being digital... building software, applications, and other new technology will be crucial to creativity for brands.

These guys are helping what I believe is a bit of a change in the way that companies look at people and brands. It will change the way we research people and hopefully make a much better market for products and services. It will also lead to easier review process for marketing companies who partner with their clients. Have we delivered that simple question.

I will love to watch where this will go next. I have a few thoughts. But I cant give everything away for free.

The average of all experiences isnt that important

Peak End Rule

View SlideShare presentation (tags: experiences brands web2.0)

This is a great rule that I found in the book Subject to Change written by the guys from Adaptive Path. I think its a fantastic way to look at continual development of experiences... as you always want to be the top and the last. The Adaptive guys call the top one the WOW factor.. which I think is something everyone needs to look for as we start to build more and more of them.

I love LOGIC + EMOTION

One of the things I love about blogging is reading other peoples blog from different fields. I am obsessed. (no really I am ask my collegeues) with David Armano over at Logic and Emotion. Its just a fantastic way of looking at the digital world from the consumer perspective. He just makes it all seem so easy.

Generalists can bring people together