She left a tenure-track teaching position and joined Intel in 1998. She was hired because Intel had a tremendous hunger to understand who might use technology and what they might do with it. As an Anthropologist, she was uniquely positioned to answer those questions.

Genevieve believes that as you are thinking about new products you should not think about how to factor in consumer culture – you just never can factor it out. Culture is what makes human beings human. It shapes how we relate to each other, it shapes how we think about ourselves, it shapes how we think about time and place, and it shapes the way we are in space. To her, culture is everything. You cannot take a person out of culture – a mistake that we frequently make.

Another common mistake that people make is to assume that all cultures are interchangeable. Some cultures have very strong orientations to one thing that other cultures don’t care about. Culture impacts not just how we are as consumers, but also how we are as citizens, how we are as workers, how we are as family and parents. Culture runs through everything and it will impact what enterprise solutions make sense as well as what consumer solutions make sense. So for her it’s not about “are we innovating products to meet consumer needs,” it’s about “are we marketing them, do we have the right partners, and are we making the right decisions about the branding collateral.”

You cannot understand culture by asking people to tell you about their culture. Culture happens in the doing. So to understand it we need to watch what people do – we learn by doing. When you do that, you will often find a discrepancy between what people say they value and do, and what they actually do. Culture is dynamic, it changes, it grows, it stretches, and it evolves. That is why the dissonance between cultural ideals and cultural practices can sometimes be very steep. That being said, as you think what it means to make things that will make sense in the world, you have to deal with both the cultural ideals and the cultural practices.
According to Genevieve, we cannot isolate consumer cultures. People live in citizen cultures and other cultures at the same time. The locus of her work is in people’s homes. She will go to the market or the temple with them sometimes, but the home seems like the most important place to make sense of things. As you are doing your research, you look for patterns – what do people keep saying, what are they not saying, what repeats and what never surfaces.

Often times, as you are trying to understand cultures, you do not want to approach the people that sit in the middle of the culture, or the normative ones. Instead, you want to seek out those that are at the edges, or the margins of those cultures – the excessive users of technology, or people who will do something to an extreme. These people often have a better picture of the whole than those that are in the middle of the culture. Their excessiveness is revealing of what is considered less excessive or more normative in that culture.

Her time-horizon varies – spending time on products that are already in market and need revisions to products that won’t be in market for a decade.

In order accommodate input from social scientists within the product development process; Intel had to change its culture. When she joined the company, Intel’s mission was basically “make Moore’s law true more often,” now it has been changed to “to touch and enrich the lives of every person on the planet.” That changed everything in the product development process – from the way they talk about who they are to themselves and to others, the way they measure success, the way they think about data, the kind of processes they use to drive innovation, and the kind of language they use to talk about their consumers.

Other things we discussed include:
• How to conduct semi-structured ethnographic interviews.
• How they think about market segmentation to conduct research.
• How internal cultures have to be aligned with the brand values.

Jamie uses a framework called the study of context to understand and predict consumer behavior in the marketplace. The study of context consists of understanding what she calls the three C’s, which are the three layers of context that are relevant:

• Client/Category Context – Understanding what happens to them as an organization and within the product category.
• Cultural Context – The large macro cultural trends that are going on in the world and that might affect the space being researched. This is also where they also look deep cultural aspects vs. trendy things that might affect the buying behavior.
• Consumer Context – What influences them in their world, and how do they interact with others in their inner circle.The idea is to find the sweet spot of where those three C’s overlap. This method also dispels the more traditional, but increasingly unrealistic, model where you have companies on the one side that create things and put them out in the marketplace with a target consumer in mind, and the consumer on the other side waiting for the company to produce something. While this model may have existed at some point, it does not lend itself to innovation and evolution.

Companies now need to understand that their customers are human first before they are people who buy and consume things. And as humans we are influenced and constrained by what is going on around us – our cultures. It is that culture which will determine what we buy and how we consume things. And the producers are humans first as well, and while they are in the business of creating trends, they are also consumers. So these days products are the result of a cyclical dialog among humans – both from the consumer side and from the producer side. It is this rich dialog that allows for innovation to happen.

Psychologists would label people who speak to themselves crazy – yet when companies talk to themselves, we call it strategy and marketing. Companies need to start incorporating customer listening and engaging with humans on the inside and the outside in order to be successful.

We closed our conversation on the important topic of storytelling. Unfortunately, most corporate marketers have forgotten how to tell real stories – especially that kind of story that gets passed around. In this day and age when a majority of buying recommendations happen through word of mouth within our tribes, it is imperative that marketers regain the art of true storytelling. The best stories are not the ones about our products and services, but those about the human and cultural aspects of our company – think of the stories making the rounds about Google and Zappos as examples. We need to incorporate our humanity into our communications.

Other things we discussed during this episode include:

• The lessons we can learn from anthropology in strategic market research.
• How ethnographic-based market research works, and how it can be pretty messy.
•  How to move away from a demographic/psychographic view of customer segmentation to a more tribal consumer model.
• How to demonstrate hard ROI by understanding human behavior and culture, which many business leaders consider “soft stuff.”
• How your internal culture and what your brand stands for have to be aligned, and how context influences brand architecture.

In modern history, humans have also increasingly been driven by not only leaving a genetic legacy, but also a cultural legacy. While it used to be the purview of the cultural elite — the published writers, famous artists, architects, wealthy art benefactors, and political leaders –, the democratization of culture through the web and cheap technologies that allow anyone to become content/culture creators, has created an environment where everyone can leave a cultural legacy.

Of course, and as many leading thinkers agree, the web is not flat, and new hierarchies that curate real cultural legacies are emerging — we just don’t know who the new cultural kingmakers are.

A good example of cultural vs. genetic legacy is that of Abraham Lincoln. His gene line died off in the early 80′s but his cultural legacy will live on for many more generations.

This article was originally posted by Francois Gossieaux at: http://www.emergencemarketing.com/2012/11/27/the-human-need-to-leave-a-cultural-legacy/

I had a great conversation with Carnegie Mellon Professor Chris Labash this week. We discussed a wide range of topics as they relate to innovation, including:

• The role of technology
• The importance of understanding human behavior and culture
• The impact of non-financial rewards
• The need for methodologies and processes
• The limits of crowd-sourcing
• The requisite for risk intelligence
• The importance of communication and face-to-face exchanges

To listen to the podcast and read a more detailed post about the discussion, please visit the Collaborative Innovation community.

*This item was originally posted by Francois Gossieaux on: http://www.emergencemarketing.com/2012/11/03/conversation-with-prof-chris-labash-from-carnegie-mellon-on-innovation/

Unless your company acts as a single tribe, which most companies don’t, you don’t have a single corporate culture. Therein lies the problem with most corporate culture initiatives — they start from the wrong premise that companies are people and that they therefore can have one culture. In reality, most companies have multiple cultures which results in having competitive behavior in the wrong place — within their corporate walls instead of outside in the marketplace.

So what is going on here?

As Edward O. Wilson said in his recent book, The Social Conquest of Earth, “People must have tribes. It gives them a name in addition to their own and social meaning in a chaotic world.” Tribes have cultures, organizations don’t — unless they are one tribe. Most organizations have many tribes — you may have a developer tribe, a sales tribe, multiple customer service tribes, a cost conscious tribe, an innovator tribe, a middle management tribe, or a tribe of Belgian-American wine drinkers. Having multiple tribes means that you have multiple cultures. Tribes share common systems of beliefs and values, they have their own language, their own rituals, and their own leaders — who may in fact have no place on your management org chart. Having multiple tribes also means that you have many “us vs. them” or “insider vs. outsider” feelings, something that always happen among tribes.

And that is where the internal competition comes from…a generally unhealthy corporate state of affairs if you are competing against a competitor which behaves like a unified tribe and which can channel all their energy to compete in the marketplace or to achieve a “change the world” type goal.

So what does that mean?

For starters, most traditional corporate culture change management programs fail…since most of them start with the assumption that organizations have a culture. The other implication is that by having multiple tribes, and in some cases mutually incompatible tribes, you may waste a lot of energy on infighting instead of innovating and competing in the marketplace.

There are ways to analyze corporate tribal cultures properly, and there are also ways to align them more closely with corporate innovation and collaboration strategies, but more on that later.

This item was originally posted by Francois Gossieaux on: http://www.emergencemarketing.com/2012/11/01/why-most-corporate-culture-programs-fail/

Like many CMO’s I spoke with recently, David is a true marketer. He spent 14 years at Apple in a variety of marketing jobs, had a few stints with startups, and returned to the corporate world to run marketing communications for Nvidia and HP. He joined Lenovo 2 1/2 years ago.

Branding is one of the top three initiatives at Lenovo and so that was one of our first points of discussion. David explained how Lenovo, driven by the industry-wide consumerization of IT, where employees increasingly bring their own devices to work, is now trying to become a leading consumer brand — not just a B2B brand which is what they have historically been known for. To be a leading consumer technology brand means that you need to appeal and be relevant to the youth market. They are the ones that care about technology in an emotional way, and they are the ones who determine what’s cool and what’s not. According to David they are also the generation that cares the most about their brands — they expect their brands to not just enable them to do what they want to do, but also to share their social values.

To appeal to the youth market and be relevant to them, Lenovo focuses, not on the computer itself, but rather on what you can do with it. A lot of the attitude and personality of their latest branding campaign centers around celebrating the cool things that people can do with the technology. Interestingly enough, they can have a somewhat uniform campaign around the globe because they found that culturally youth have more in common with one another worldwide that they have with their local cultures.

Because consumers prefer to get their recommendations from peers rather than from companies, Lenovo had to rethink how they communicate with their audiences. David told a real cool story to illustrate his point. They have computers that will now boot up in 10 seconds and had this idea to throw a computer out of a plane with the computer controlling the parachute. If the skydiver could not boot up the computer in less than 10 seconds, there would not be enough time for the parachute to deploy and it would hit the ground. In the old days you would have faked the scene and produced the ad as cheaply as possible. They actually did the whole stunt and had two guys that had done a lot of films for MTV document how they did it. That movie went viral. So in effect they got people to watch the ad by having the meta-ad go viral. Pretty nifty if you ask me. Marketers now have to develop content in such a way that it will be used and travel as part of peer-to-peer recommendations.

Just as in past interviews, David too believes that you have to live the brand inside before you can credibly portray that brand in the marketplace. Their aim is therefore to have a unified employer and consumer brand.

David then explained his three principles of marketing. The first one being balance — with the need to balance between short term and long term impact. The second one is simplification — where the simpler something looks from the outside, the better it is. The third one is that you should always try to “wow” the customer — and they have to notice it. It has to stand out, and it has to be differentiated. If you cannot have the wow factor, don’t do it.

Next we switched to the topic of culture — a topic near and dear to Lenovo. Being a truly global company and growing through mergers and acquisitions all over the globe,  it has always been important for Lenovo to have a unified culture — they call it the Lenovo Way, which is embodied in the slogan “We do what we say and own what we do.” It is a culture of commitment and one steeped in the Human 1.0 characteristic of reciprocity. As with other successful companies that have strong internal cultures, Lenovo makes the four shared values that lead up the culture part of the annual HR review process.

As with most technology companies, innovation has always been a big part of the Lenovo culture. It has changed over time in two aspects. First, by recently becoming the leader in the marketplace, they had to start thinking about doing things differently. As a challenger you tend to focus more on execution whereas a leader you need to focus more on innovation — which also means having a different risk profile. The other cause for change is that they now want to rely on all employees and customers for innovation, not just the technology geeks in RD.

As usual, we closed out the conversation with a discussion around metrics. At Lenovo they track the usual metrics for demand generation — number of leads, price point at which you’re selling, etc. For branding, which has a longer term consequence, they use two metrics — purchase consideration, with the goal of being in the top three, and brand premium, which looks at what percentage of the dollars you are getting in any market category.

Other things we discussed include:

• How content that you put out about your brand has to be genuine and authentic — and what that actually means
• How to let go of the need to control the message as a marketer
• How Lenovo leverages its 27,000 employees, who in many cases are also customers, as part of their marketing efforts.
• How companies have to focus on tribes rather than market segments
• The importance of keeping a balance between ongoing continuous improvement innovation and breakthrough innovations.

*This item was originally posted by Francois Gossieaux on: http://www.cmotwo.com/2012/10/22/cmo-2-0-conversation-with-david-roman-cmo-at-lenovo/

Having done research in the area of big data for multiple clients, and having interviewed many CIO’s and CMO’s on the topic, there are a few things that stand out in this emerging market .

1. CMO’s cannot expect results by going it alone
   Some CMO’s are buying their own technology solutions to gain actionable insights from big data.  Unfortunately, most marketing departments lack the wherewithal to deploy sophisticated technology solutions and will never achieve the promise of big data on their own. Even if they have the product management skills to deploy technology, they most likely don’t have the right data-related expertise on the team to get the actionable insights from the data.
2. CMO’s cannot rely on their agency for big data
   Agencies only see a small sliver of the customer data, that related to advertising and possibly lead gen. They do not have access to the other rich data sources that most companies have about their customers, including CRM, customer support data, bricks and mortar data, credit card data, purchasing data, etc.  So relying on only a small portion of the data will leave marketers vulnerable to competitors that can truly mine and base decisions on the comprehensive customer data set.
3. CMO’s should team up with their CIO’s to tap into the promise of big data
   The only way for the CMO to tap into the promise of big data is by teaming up with the CIO. For that relation to work, however, both will have to have a shift in behavior. CIO’s have to stop considering themselves as service providers to the marketing organization and instead set themselves up as true partners to the business — with a deep understanding of the customer facing processes and desired outcomes.  CMO’s will have to become much more disciplined in how they document requirements for technology and data analytics support. As Jim suggested, a quick way to the get CIO’s and CMO’s to align is by giving them the same goals.

What do you think? I would appreciate your input on it.

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*This item was originally posted by Francois Gossieaux on: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/EmergenceMarketing/~3/zDJ8y1ZR0R4/

Another important Human 1.0 characteristic that most companies are not leveraging enough is social learning. Humans are the only species that are predominantly social learners. We learn by observing others. It is genetic and also part of our culture. Think of a baby that mimics adults before they can sit, walk,or talk — in fact they do it almost instantaneous after being born. That is the hardwired social learning system that humans have had for eons at work.

Where else could you leverage this innate human characteristic?

1. With your customers
   We mimic what others do and adopt the decisions of our tribes as our own. Some call it herding. The key here is to make visible how others make buying decisions to similar people who have not yet made those buying decisions. Amazon does a great job at that — how many books or other Amazon items have you bought because their system told you, after you purchased an item, that “others who bought this item, also bought this?” It works — we tend to imitate others that are like us. How can you make the way others buy your products and services visible to prospects that are like them? Think about it. Traditional reference programs are a step in the right direction, but in this digital and interconnected world, there must be much better ways to do that.
2. With your employees
   Many companies go through massive change management programs without ever leveraging the social learning for which we are hardwired. We mimic people who are successful — that is how we learn new things. So if your change management initiative is intended to produce certain new behaviors, make sure you reward and recognize those that are exhibiting that behavior, and make it easy for others to observe this behavior leads to success. Granted, in the real world it is much more complicated than that. For starters, behaviors are an externalization of shared beliefs and values — and so the right set of values and beliefs have to be in place for the proper behavior to show up in the first place. But once you have that — too few companies leverage the impact of the observability of success. Worse than that, many companies have a total dissonance between what they say and what they do — they may be encouraging a collaborative culture, while at the same time rewarding bullying management tactics by promoting the bullies. Guess what, this will inevitably lead to a bullying culture because we are social learners.

Do you have any other thoughts on this topic — leave a comment about it.

This item was originally posted by Francois Gossieaux on:
http://www.emergencemarketing.com/2012/10/16/social-learning-is-a-human-1-0-trait-leverage-it-with-your-employees-and-customers/

In fact research that we conducted in partnership with The Society for New Communications Research found that almost 20% of companies have an employer brand that is different from their consumer brand. And almost 70% of those that said there was a difference between the brands, also said that their organization was not attempting to make them similar.

Worse than having a different brand is when organizations show prospective employees a different organizational brand during the recruiting process as compared to the brand they experience after they are hired – they account for 15% of all companies that participated in our research (1,000+).

Having an employer brand that is different from your consumer brand may in fact not be such a great idea, and here is why:

1. A consumer brand promise in embedded in a company’s culture and how they behave behind the firewall

With more and more employees interacting with customers and prospects, your internal culture will inevitably become part of your perceived brand promise.

As John Kennedy, the head of corporate marketing at IBM said during a recent CMO 2.0 Conversation: “It is this whole intersection between not only what marketers promise and how a product may or may not perform, but also what the company is like behind the brand.” Or as Phil Clement, the CMO at Aon said during another CMO 2.0 Conversation, when he described how Aon spent two years building the brand from the inside out before taking it out to the marketplace, convinced that their consumer brand is in fact an externalization of their internal values and beliefs: “And then (we) spent about two years building consensus around the company that those characteristics were true, and built credibility around them, so that when we started to talk the talk, the employees and teammates and colleagues would be walking the walk.”

And these are not the only CMO’s that believe that, so do the CMO’s at SAP, Kimpton, Con-Way, and Macys.

2. The numbers show that is a bad idea to keep them separate

The same research study mentioned higher found that companies that show a unified employer and consumer brand can expect the following benefits compared to those that maintain separate brands:

• 1.6X higher employee satisfaction
• 3.5X higher employee loyalty
• 2.7X the number of self-directed employees
• 1.7X the number of new employees who have a positive impression of the company
• 1.5X the number of employees who are proud to tell others that they work with their organization
• 1.5-3X being more attractive to recent college grads

Those numbers are even worse for those organizations that show a different organizational brand during the recruiting process than they really have once an employee joins the company.

It pays to have consistent brands!

This article was originally posted by Francois Gossieaux on: http://www.emergencemarketing.com/2012/10/12/why-your-employer-brand-and-your-consumer-brand-should-be-the-same/

According to John, the main causes for the recent changes in marketing come from the digitization of business and the increased interconnectedness of people. The fundamental change that marketing has undergone is that it has once again become a social science — it is about understanding how people connect, what they aspire to, and what motivates them to do what they do.

At IBM they use three lenses to understand how the marketing function is fundamentally changing — knowing the customer, knowing markets, and knowing audiences. In the past marketers were mostly limited to understanding their customers in terms of big demos and big psycho-graphics. Now, big data allows marketers to understand their customer at the individual level. Big data also gives marketers the ability to serve market segments better — moving from a transactional focus to a much more customer-centric conversation around the benefits of products and services.  The last lens relates to the fact that both companies and customers now have a much higher visibility and transparency into one another’s business —  with customers who now being able to see behind the firewall and assess whether the way a company operates actually matches with what it promises through its marketing.

Like other leading marketers that I interviewed recently, John too believes that the brand is not just embedded in the promise that marketing makes about its products and services and how well those products and services deliver against that promises, but it is also embedded in the culture of the company — how the company actually behaves behind the firewall. Along those lines, IBM has done a lot of work in humanizing its brand by allowing the IBM brand to be defined by the IBMer. They see themselves as an intellectual capital company, with their employees delivering the value that gets created and offered for their customer.

Next we talked about the shifting advocacy role that marketers need to embrace. They increasingly need to take all the learnings that they develop about the customer and bring that back to the C-Suite rather than think of themselves as the corporate spokesperson in the marketplace. While marketers will continue to have the need to communicate messages to the marketplace, a majority of the content about a company’s products and services now flows through word-of-mouth.

Once again, marketers need to become more inter-disciplinary, and be concerned about more aspects of the company’s operations than they have traditionally been involved with. With the brand being impacted by so much more of the company’s operations, marketers need to think way beyond the four P’s when they think about their role. Not only do they need to become more knowledgeable, they also need to rely on more of their C-Suite counterparts to help execute the brand. And with marketing becoming increasingly technology-enabled, which is especially true of their relationship with the CIO.

Marketing in the future will not feel like marketing. It will increasingly feel like a welcome service. With marketers developing a better understanding of consumer behavior, both through social sciences and data, marketers will be able to deliver a whole new level of value to their customers. In order to so, however, marketers will need to develop a level of “digital empathy” — by not only contacting customers with the goal of achieving commercial results.

Following this conversation on the changing role of marketers, we switched to the topic of culture. According to IBM research, leading marketers are focusing more on corporate character than on the products they sell. As I said before, marketers have to become concerned with not only how a company comes across in its marketing, but how the company actually operates — and that is called culture, or in IBM parlance corporate character. Culture, of course, is the externalization of shared corporate values and beliefs.

We closed the conversation on the topic of measurements and ROI, which is increasingly tricky as marketing contributions spans both the range of hard things and soft things. Marketers are going to have to be careful to select those key analytics in this growing amount of information that best represent their contributions.

Other things that we discussed include:

• How market researchers need to shift their thinking from consumer segments to consumer tribes.
•  How to leverage social media and communities as part of marketing.
• The importance of listening to what is being said about your brand and gauge the sentiment of those conversations.
• The importance of matching internal tribes with external tribes.
• The changing need for talent within the marketing department.
• How the promise of gaining actionable insights from big data is still very much in the early stages.
• How to transition from a transactional customer relationship to one that is focused on the customer journey.
• How to balance an historic/iconic brand like IBM with having a brand that appeals to new generations and consumer tribes with the example of Smarter Planet as a platform to make that happen at IBM.

This interview was originally posted by Francois Gossieaux on:

http://www.cmotwo.com/2012/10/02/cmo-2-0-conversation-with-john-kennedy-vp-of-corporate-marketing-at-ibm/