Book review – From products to customers to the human spirit: Marketing 3.0 By Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiawan

I’ve just read and written a review (for Professional Marketing magazine) of “From products to customers to the human spirit: Marketing 3.0” by Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya, Iwan Setiawan. It suggests that Marketing 3.0 is where marketing has evolved from being product centric, to consumer centric to being focused on humankind. Lofty ideals indeed.

Early on it looks at the importance of social media (both expressive and collaborative forms) in being a key enabler in this massive shift in marketing.

Collaborative marketing is the first building block of Marketing 3.0 and this should have great resonance with the professions where we are seeing major corporations forge much closer partnerships with their professional advisers in terms of shared knowledge bases and the building of systems together.

Cultural marketing is the second building block of Marketing 3.0 addressing concerns and desires of global citizens – another key issue for the professions as we struggle with the challenge of balancing global reach and local connection.

The third force is the rise of creative society – right brainers who work in creative sectors such as science, art and professional services. Again, the professions – for so long used to leading the way – has started to adapt to the idea that consumers (both businesses and individuals) are more sophisticated and no longer passive recipients.

It explores these three changes that lead to Marketing 3.0 – Participation and Collaborative Marketing, Globalisation Paradox and Cultural Marketing and Age of Creative Society and Human Spirit Marketing and offers an interesting model:

From Product management (Four Ps - product, price, place, promotion) to Co-creation

From Customer management (Segmentation, targeting and positioning) to Communitization

From Brand management (Brand building) to character building

It suggests that Marketing 3.0 complements emotional marketing with human spirit marketing. Then it goes on to talk about how marketers must identify the anxieties and desires of the consumers to be able to target their minds, hearts and spirits. I get a bit nervous when marketers are charged with such important tasks and prefer to focus on the need to develop culturally relevant campaigns.

After a brief look at new approaches to innovation (cocreation with customers and suppliers) – which I found useful - it moves onto communitization and points to Seth Godin’s observation in “Tribes” that consumers want to be connected to other consumers more than companies. Strong support for the professions to engage in social media I thought.

There is an interesting exploration of Prahalad’s “The Fortune at the Bottom of the pyramid” and Hart’s “Capitalism at the crossroads” which identified the new potential of the poor as both a growing consumer market and a prominent lab for innovation. And as legal markets in the Western world mature, the idea that we look to the poorer segments is a good one and should provide some food for thought and, hopefully, real innovation.

In chapter four – marketing the values to employees – there are some helpful ideas around employee participation and internal marketing which is so often neglected in marketing texts. In particular, it refers to the studies by Erickson, Dychtwald and Morrison reveal six segments of employees:

- Low obligation and easy income seeking quick wins
- Flexible support goes with the flow don’t see job as a priority yet
- Risk and reward see jobs as opportunities to challenge and excite themselves
- Individual expertise and team success seeks jobs offering teamwork and collaboration
- Secure progress looks for a promising career path
- Expressive legacy looks for opportunities to create a lasting impact on the company

It also mentions McKinsey’s four types:
- Go with a winner (growth an achievement)
- Big risk big reward (good compensation)
- Lifestyle (flexibility) and
- Save the world (contribute to a great mission).

I liked the reminder that you should convince people by telling stories and engaging their emotions rather than providing data and engaging their intellect.

At the end there is a summary of the credos of Marketing 3.0 which are worth repeating:

Credo 1 – Love your customers, respect your competitors (Win their loyalty through giving them great value and touching their emotions and spirit)

Credo 2 – Be sensitive to change, be ready to transform

Credo 3 – Guard your name, be clear about who you are

Credo 4 – Customers are diverse; go first to those who can benefit most from you

Credo 5 – Always offer a good package at a fair price

Credo 6 – Always make yourself available, spread the good news

Credo 7 – Get your customers, keep and grow them (a CRM plug)

Credo 8 – Whatever your business, it is a service business

Credo 9 – Always refine your business process in terms of quality, cost and delivery

Credo 10 – Gather relevant information but use wisdom in making your final decision

The book is structured as follows:

Chapters:

Part I - Trends
1. Welcome to Marketing 3.01
2. Future Model for Marketing 3.0
Part II – Strategy
3. Marketing the mission to consumers
4. Marketing the values to employees
5. Marketing the values to channel partners
6. Marketing the vision to shareholders
Part III – Application
7. Delivering socio-cultural transformation
8. Creating emerging market entrepreneurs
9. Striving for environmental sustainability
10. Putting it all together

Making the most of meetings

Most lawyers, surveyors and accountants moan about how many internal meetings they have to attend and what a huge amount of time (and money) is wasted in them. So how do we make our meetings more effective?

Common sense and communication

The professions are bright people. They understand that effective meetings require preparation, objectives, a clear agenda, a chairperson, debate and decisions and minutes - but it rarely happens. So what’s the problem?

The answer, of course, is that people are “too busy”. They often don’t have time to properly research and prepare on a specific project or topic so they gather people together “for a chat” to get the brain juices running. Often, the meeting is to scope an issue and take soundings of other people’s views. In effect, it isn’t a “meeting” that they need but just some “heads up” time. And this can be achieved in less formal and less time expensive ways than a meeting and all that it entails.

Another angle is that meetings are a time when people from disparate parts of the firm come together to exchange ideas and/or to brief more junior members of the team on key developments. These communication opportunities can sometimes be achieved in more effective ways than a formal meeting (have a think about teleconferencing, webinars, teleconferences, awaydays, socials, internal communication tools like Yammer, intranets, team break outs or simply “walking about” etc).

How long?

Why do people always schedule an hour for meetings? Why not 15 minutes or 30 minutes or 45 minutes? Or, if you record your time in 6 minute chunks – what about 12, 18, 24 or 36 minute meetings? Perhaps set the meeting so that people are in the room at 10am for a prompt 1015am start – that way those who didn’t get around to preparing can do so and you have built in time for any catching up or settling down behaviour.

And we all use electronic calendars (!) – with reminders that can be set to provide an early warning time of 15 minutes or more. A little bit of diary management and we can ensure that we allocate preparation time for meetings so that we don’t turn up in a raging hurry from the previous meeting having done no preparation.

And while it seems to be OK for meetings to over run, why don’t we more often have people say “All done – and with 20 minutes time left. Aren’t we efficient?”

How often?

I’ve also noticed that many firms have “regular” slots for meetings – every Monday morning, every last Thursday of the month and so on.

I know that it is important to maintain the impetus on certain initiatives but are they ALL really necessary? How often are the regular meetings challenged with something like “Do we actually need to get together this week/month? – Let’s hold off until next month and we can hold the only agenda item til them as it isn’t urgent”.

Better still, if it has been agreed at a previous meeting that someone will do something, aren’t we all grown up enough to assume that they WILL actually do it without being checked up on at the next meeting (Yes, I realise that this sadly often isn’t the case in the professions – but I can dream can’t i?).

Or, being even more radical, why doesn’t the department head or project leader simply call or pop into those who agreed to complete actions to check up that they have done so and to agree the next steps?

Learn from other industries

I remember being impressed when I was invited to the launch of British Airways’ Waterside offices several years ago. The meetings rooms didn’t have chairs and the tables were higher to accommodate standing people. If people can’t sit down the meetings are likely to be shorter.

And another thing, why waste time at the start of meetings getting cups of coffee and other refreshments – can’t this be done in non meeting times?

Influencers but not decision makers

Too often there are way too many people at meetings. Often in the professions it isn’t easy to identify who is actually responsible for a particular topic and to sort the “would like to be involved” folk from the “I am involved and will actually do something” people. Therefore there is a cast of thousands at a meeting, rather than the handful of people who really need to be there.

This can be easily addressed by sending information to the wider group of people and asking only those with a responsibility or real need to be present to attend the meeting. If your minutes are good then those with a passing interest can learn what was discussed and agreed and comment afterwards if necessary.

Role models and power plays

If the most senior people ensure that they are ready at the start of the meeting, having read the relevant papers in advance and focus on keeping to the agenda and time allocation then you can be pretty confident that everyone else will do the same. Obvious really.

There is also a tendency for the most senior people to chair the meetings. But they often lack the skills or desire to manage the time effectively – possibly for fear of upsetting or appearing to cut short one of their peer partners.

However, I have observed that in many firms often the most senior folk are amongst the last to arrive. And the excuse “Sorry – I was on a call to a client” seems to prevent anyone from challenging their tardy arrival and the disruption it causes (I don’t think I am the only one who wants to throttle the late arriving partner who says “I may have missed it at the beginning but…”. I always want to say “Yes, you did miss it and we aren’t going over it again”).

Culture

On a more serious note, does your senior management and culture support strict adherence to basic meeting manners? It might be that you prepare a simple “Meeting Rules Sheet” on which a few basic guidelines are written to which everyone (yes, that means you) adheres. Much easier to point to the agreed behaviours when challenging non conformance.

It takes 21 days to break an old habit and create a new one. So how about a concerted effort on better meetings by a month long campaign on “Better meetings” to allow everyone the opportunity to try doing things differently – and better?