The Solution

Signs of the times

By Rick McMullen August 23, 2024 Change Management, Marketing

The current US election cycle is adding more data points to a trend. Legacy media is complaining that they are not getting the access to the candidates that they’re used to. It’s true, they’re not. The Harris campaign is bypassing them and getting directly in front of the electorate by using social media channels, and being very successful in doing so.

Legacy media had a transactional relationship with political candidates. Media got the content to sell their product, and the candidates used the only venue available to them to get their message out. Both parties benefitted. At the recent convention, the Democrats put influencers in a bull pen directly in front of the stage and they were live posting to their followers, generating an instant connection. Legacy media was put in the stadium’s upper tiers, well away from the front line. Why use a translator if you can make an immediate, direct connection?

The market has changed. This campaign highlights exactly how. If legacy media wants to stay in the game, they need to offer something the direct connection can’t. I don’t profess to know what that is, there might not be a viable solution.

One thing to note for any organization is the language being used by the Harris campaign. Keep in mind, these are people who will get access to trillion-dollar economies and nuclear weapons and they’re they’re using real language. It’s not wrapped in ‘policy speak’, they’re saying things in all mediums as if it was a one-on-one conversation. It’s real and it’s consistently authentic. That should be the main take-away.

Self-imposed Bureaucracy

By Rick McMullen December 29, 2020 Change Management, Human Resources, Marketing

Not all change is easy. The opposite is also true – not all change is hard. The key to anchoring any change in your culture is knowing how to handle both.

As with most problems, solving the problem is rooted in ensuring you ask the right questions to define what the actual problem is and allowing the solution to naturally flow from the answers, without bias.

“I bet that’ll work” and “Ooohh… that’s going to be tough” are sure-fire approaches to failure without doing the research. That can be as simple as a SWOT exercise (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats).

As ‘Change’ is the process of altering people’s behavior and not a ‘Project,’ we need to know where are people are starting, clearly identify what they’re going to face going through the change, and ensuring they have the tools available to get there.

You may have already walked the path of change. The people the change is being imposed on also have to walk that path. Maybe you just need to point. Maybe you’ll need to provide a compass, a machete, and rations. Figure that one out. That’s job one.

Don’t just make a statement. Do the work

By Rick McMullen November 24, 2020 Change Management, Communications, Marketing

In recent years the world and our society has faced a litany of harsh realities. #MeToo, #BLM, #MMIW… it’s a long list. And companies, large & small have had to make some choices as to whether they make a statement in support of the cause that caught their attention (or the attention of their customers) or perhaps make a donation.

This is good. Unless it’s done for purely marketing purposes. A couple of years ago, Apple made an announcement that they had achieved gender equity in their payroll. Catch that? It was an announcement. It was news. How do we make it *not* news?

The one thing that Apple did do, was the work required to be able to make that announcement. What’s better than any announcement saying you support something? Doing. The. Work.

Most racists say they’re not racist. Toxic masculinity doesn’t admit to being misogynistic. So what separates those that say it by making a statement and those that really mean it? The work.

Accept the shame that goes with privilege. It’s ok. Step up and own the previous mistakes. Know you’ll make more. If necessary, apologize but then fix it and… Do the work.

Math for your emotions

By Rick McMullen February 26, 2020 Marketing

If you’re in a situation where you need to purchases the perfect amount of supplies so you don’t buy too much and also don’t want to lose out on sales by having too few, how much do you buy? It’s called ‘the newsvendor problem’ in supply chain management and the formula can be quite complicated involving ‘salvage’ – what you can sell the surplus for. Mathematically, the equation ideally solves at zero. You buy exactly the amount you’re going to sell. You have no leftovers, and no one leaves disappointed.

But how do you know you didn’t miss out? Did anyone see you were sold out and didn’t express disappointment? What if you have just one leftover? Not ‘zero’, not ‘some’, just one. Forget about math, isn’t that the only amount that satisfies you emotionally that you didn’t miss out on sales? This is the difference between solving the equation and solving the emotion. Sometimes you can’t have both and it’s worth deciding which one is more important to you before you start.

Is that one a waste? If it’s stale-dated like food, sure and of course you could be positioned for scarcity. You can also end up with one slice of pizza and who takes the last slice? Different problems for a different day…

Ready for the next massive marketing disruption?

By Rick McMullen July 5, 2019 Marketing, Social Media

Many businesses are still trying to get up to speed on, what they believe, is the current state of the Internet and how to play in that arena. Problem one is that what they think is the ‘current state’ is actually yesterday’s. The current state is not owned by the Google search engine as we are familiar with it, it’s owned by Alexa (Still Google) & Siri. We’re not on the verge of a marketing disruption, it’s underway.

Got a question? Ask Siri. Do you get pages of answers? No. You get one. One. Consumer choice is being reduced, and perhaps eventually, eliminated. What is the strategy going to be, or really should be now, for a business to get to the top of the listings when there isn’t going to be a ‘listing’? Even a browser search’s top listings today are owned by the likes of Google themselves, Wikipedia or Amazon. It appears that the answer to this is going to be the demise of ‘free’ site boosting techniques – think SEO – and more ‘pay-to-play’ techniques. Who has the money to compete against Amazon?

We can think about the coming problem as being similar to what accommodations businesses face having to compete for top Internet search listings against TripAdvisor and Trivago only this won’t be industry-specific, it’ll be universal. The real stick-in-the-mud is that we did this. We, as consumers, have made Google as powerful as it is, and is going to be, just by using it.

Oops.

Translating thoughts

By Rick McMullen April 20, 2019 Communications, Human Resources, Marketing

Perhaps the simplest method of transmitting a complex idea is to say it. To tell someone. The problem is, that involves at least two translations.

How do you think? Is it in words? Emotions? Do you see text? Do you hear words? While you’re thinking, do you concern yourself with what specific words mean? Why do we use expressions such as, “Think before you speak.” or “Perhaps you should use your ‘inside’ voice.” or even “Engage some filters.”

Is it fair to say that regardless of how you believe you think about ideas, that it requires some ‘processing’ before we release those thoughts to the world? There’s our first translation.

How about when you hear someone else’s thought? Does it always make perfect sense as soon as you’re exposed to it, or do we process incoming information before we assimilate it? Translation number two.

Ideas aren’t computer data. There’s no such thing as a perfect copy. We can’t plug a thumb drive into our head, copy an idea and share that exactly as we developed it. Not yet at least.