The Every Day Life / Post Digital culture is presenting us with new marketing concepts and opportunities. Changing our focus from creating customers through products, and better customers through line extensions. To focusing on direct relations, memberships and extended value.

Two things:

- Products are worthless until they are introduced to the situation where they create value. (link)

- It’s not only the content industries (music, film, media) that will be affected by the changes brought by digital communication. As both people’s behaviors, and their accessibility change, more and more business categories will find that the fundamentals for how they create customers, are disrupted.

In the words of Peter Drucker:

“The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. ”
- Peter Drucker

This invites companies to think of themselves as value providers, not product providers, to understand that customers are created through members, not features. And that extending customer value comes from within the situation where we are already creating value, not artificial product line extensions introducing foreign situations to the customers.

A simple diagram to introduce some suggested changes:

As long as the standards for measuring value belongs the old Attention Web mindset, the ability to prove new value and need for new strategies will become increasingly difficult. Fortunately the solutions are right under our noses.

Explanation of Attention Web and Everyday Life mindset.

In this presentation, held at the INMA conference Wednesday, I asked if the numbers generated by web analytics software are generating the right kind of value? And to which degree the simplicity and accessibility of these numbers are moving our focus away from what’s really important, (creating “situational” value), to something that’s important for something else (understanding movement patterns).

It’s an idea I picked up from Adrian Ho a couple of months ago, which rings stronger and stronger as I see that the Everyday Life mindset demands us to understand that our solutions, even our brand foundations, might be built around a completely new set of values as both peoples behaviors, and their accessibility to companies change.

Slideshow below, or here.

How can we to effectively help companies and organizations enter a new digital mindset when the ways of measuring effect still relies on tools “invented” in the sixties. (Or so?) Where effect is measured AFTER an event has occurred when all authentic value has disappeared. We are left to rely blindly on people’s shoddy memory.

Two things:

1. People tend to remember events as they imagined them to be. According to Dan Gilbert our memory is a set of snapshots of an event, and remembering stuff consists of collecting all the relevant snapshots and filling in the blanks in between. We tend to fill these holes based on perception, not what actually happened. So asking someone about something would give you an answer more similar to how they perceived it to be beforehand rather then how they actually felt as the experience occurred.

2. We are already measuring stuff as it is happening. But this consists mainly of behavioral patterns, tracking people’s movement. The problem with this is that we only observe what people do, not discover why they do it.

So this is the challenge/opportunity: We need to get inside the situations and measure REAL value AS it is happening.

The Internet used to be simple, a digital reflection of the old media industry. The beauty of this beast was that media companies and media agencies really didn’t need to change that much. They kept their business models, they knew the formats, and they knew the product they sold. Everything was simple, undisruptive and perfect. The need for new measuring instruments – which measured different stuff in different ways wasn’t in demand.

Now, what I’m saying in the slideshow Changing the Currency is that we are entering a new digital landscape: The Everyday Life. This is a result of behavioral change from technology’s immersion into our daily life.

In this new mindset, value is not about attention, interest or in many cases sales. It’s about creating additional value, building relations and generating exchanges of ideas.

We are in a place where we need to start measuring completely different stuff from the stuff we are good or bad at measuring today. Because it’s not only media, the Internet or people that change, it is also the platform on which valuable companies and brands are built. And by that we also need new methods and tools to measure it.

My proposition is to learn from the car industry, Nike ID, Fiat Eco:drive, Nike Plus and the likes. Create an arena for measuring value. Where tools are designed to generate real time, live data, by the participants – to be shipped back to the company giving us the data we need in order to develop groundbreaking insights.

Measuring stuff in the Every Day Life mindset doesn’t happen outside an event, it needs to be integrated inside of it. We need to understand what value is and what’s important. And then have concepts built from the ground up around the goal of discovering new stuff, not add research on at the end as a way of finding out what we already knew.

We seem to be looking for universal principles, when we should be looking for fragmentation.

It’s quite common when trying to understand something that we try to simplify it, searching for consistencies and core principals. The problem is when we apply the find to other stuff as well as a universal principal for everything similar.

Even though universal laws or guidelines might seem like a good idea, it is often the complete opposite of something useful.

Take the Music Industry as an example. These days they are trying to find the ONE law to rule them all, to solve the problem for both universal, international, national or independent artists and bands – but is there ONE undiscovered answer? Or should there be many?

As we become more insightful and smarter regarding a subject, our articulation of it increases which leads us to discover details that we didn’t know existed to begin with. As a subject gets bigger we also find minute differences and details that make what seemed similar quite opposite.

Ignoring the nuances and fragmentation’s inside a subject as we try to make our ideas accessible to other people through graphs and sound bites :o), makes it easier to get understood, but demands the reader to ask more questions. (which is a good thing)

I hope the people reading this blog understand that I’m not trying to find universal answers. I’m exploring a landscape, square inch by square inch. And one answer might be a good solution to one problem, but might not give a full and complete answer to a lot of other stuff, or even be downright terrible.

Malcolm Gladwell inspired me to start thinking of this whole thing as a giant puzzle:

“We are all collecting small pieces of the same puzzle. One day maybe we’ll get so far that it starts making sense.”

If you want to know what the future might look like, start tuning your antennas to the ideas of Kevin Slavin of Area/Code. In this talk he explores some ideas on “the new livingroom”, where TV and online participation converge into a new experience, where viewers and participants reconnect.

In the talk, which Kevin is holding at the 5D Immersive Design Conference, he is as disruptive as in his last presentation at PSFK: “The mobile eco-system”.

Not to spoil it, but to give you a heads up, Kevin talks about games and the convergence of TV and Participation through simultaneous online activities. (The new Livingroom):

“Games with computers in them” (not the other way around)
“Televisions amazing, because it’s an event”
“Viewers and users are the same people, and the question is how to reconnect them again”

“We forgot what was so great about television, that it was something we all did at the same time, and it was kind of amazing. There was something that happened, something we all experienced that we could all talk about the next day. We had this kind of common conversation that was provided by it. And this goes away when you start time shifting, but it is actually really magic. And if you start thinking of television as something that we are all huddled around, for half an hour at a time, like all of us. It’s actually really magic. It’s something that only television could do.” (a tad rewritten :o)

Via offworld.

5D Conference : New Television Pt 4 – Kevin Slavin from Dave Blass on Vimeo.

The first ten years of digital was (to a large extent) the same siloed ideas that we’d already been exploiting for decades on other content and messaging transportation infrastructures (media). It was a carbon copy.

It is only in the last 2-4 years something interesting and revolutionary has surfaced through the emergence of social media (the collective exchange of ideas) and digital utilities.

This creates a new currency for marketing online, not replacing traditional advertising / messaging but competing for the same budget and offering a completely different set of returns.

Since posting this presentation two days ago, I’ve added some ideas to it, relating to Time and Direct Relationships.

Apologies for re-posting, but this is the conclusion to my series on the new currency online, with special focus on opportunities for media companies.

- What is value in Everyday Life marketing
- A New Business Model, for content that Grows, Connects and Augments
- The Direct relationship Business

Find the Slideshow below, or here.
(If you have already seen the first version the second one might not cache, there should be a yellow ribbon in the upper left corner if you are watching the updated version).

Jeff Jarvis in this video, from the Nokia Ideas Project, states that since the Internet is a connection machine, anything creating artificial middle men, preventing companies from connecting directly with their participants, will become problematic.

All that is true for the old Attention Web, but the whole problem seems to be turned into an opportunity when we change to the Everyday Life mindset: In which digital media companies become partners with their clients in order to supply a direct relationship with the readers and participants.

As Geoff Northcott of *supercollider pointed out very clearly in his post “visualizing the decline of the destination web, the rise of the social web”, the destination web is on the decline. And if Jaap Favier of Forrester is correct, then the Media Companies that will survive are the ones that create and facilitate arenas for brands to connect with their customers on.

This would give, that in the new perspective of digital media, what Jarvis points out is not a problem, it’s an opportunity. In the Every Day Life mindset, digital media is in the “Creating Direct Relations” business, not in the “messaging” or “middle men” business.

There is a big difference between how the existing media business models work in the old landscape compared to how they will work in the new.

Blindly copying concept from platforms where content actually disappears removes us from the ability to create value in an updated reality where content is stored in the “long here”. Where it isn’t static, but grows, connects and augments.

If media is to take advantage of the opportunities in the Everyday Life marketing landscape we need to shred the idea of short term, Attention Web concepts like clicks, views or time.

Explanation of terms here..

As some of my readers know, I’ve tried the last week to digg up some hopefully interesting or inspiring thoughts on the challenges of the media industry. I believe in the industry, but I also believe it needs to break out of the limitations of their traditional mindset if they are to discover new and innovative opportunities. There is a lot of artificially constructed walls limiting their creativity when it comes to developing new ideas.

Understanding how the concept of time has changed, unlocks a few barriers:

1. There is no time. As I stated in my introduction. Content doesn’t disappear, it gets more valuable. We need to connect companies with this content, help it grown, and build mutual and extended value.

2. Time introduces an artificial constraint into the company / participant relationship that limits the participants opportunity to engage and connect with the companies brand values.

Now it’s artificial in the sense that it is not designed by the value proposition offered by the brand to the customer (summer, Easter or Christmas related products could have done that), but it’s limited by money. To be more correct, it’s limited by the cost of running messages in media.

Now in the Everyday Life marketing landscape the goal is to connect and share values with the participant. Constraints on time creates a problem, best articulated by Amanda Mooney back in January:

“If you’ve only budgeted 2 months to be available to our community, we’re only going to give you 2 seconds of our time … at best.” – Amanda Mooney

As I see it, if Media Companies are to have a role – or get value out of the Everyday Life Marketing potential they need to put aside this limitation, they need to develop products for companies and participants without the constraints of time attached. Not putting clicks or views or days as a business model – but shared value.

As we are moving from the Attention Web to an Everyday Life, where technology and communication are integrated parts, providing additional deliberate value becomes increasingly important in companies marketing initiatives – as opposed to attention, interest and interruption. But what is “value”?

After posting a slidedeck on value as the new currency of marketing (found at the bottom of the post, or here), I’ve gotten some interesting question regarding what I mean by value. I’ll try to explain:

It starts with the original intention behind the company and it’s products:

Products are the result of someone seeing an opportunity to create something that will add value to an existing situation. To keep it very simple, let’s say as an example this situation is exercising and the product is a dumbbell.

Now, during most part of the owner’s ordinary day the dumbbell on its own is relatively worthless and uninteresting, but when the owner wants to exercise its function inside the situation of exercising makes it pretty important.

The dumbbell belongs to the situation of exercising and everything that is related to this situation. The situation becomes a context.

Context: “the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.”
– Apple Dictionary

Now what I’m saying is that all products are designed to create a natural value inside a context. For the dumbbell it’s the effect it lends to the act of the exercise.

The dumbbell belongs to the context of exercising, and the brand (in the case of this example) does as well.

Now the new opportunities in digital belong to two categories: the Exchange of Ideas (Social Media) and Utilities. The best ideas come from the arenas were these two converge, but for the sake of clarity, I’ll explain it as two exclusive concepts:

Exchange of ideas
In social media people like to talk about stuff, things that are important to them. A lot of people like to talk about exercising. Now what we see is that people want to share things in order to have something to talk about, and companies have a lot of stuff to share. This is value: Something interesting or useful that people like to share in order to ignite a conversation. The company behind the dumbbell can create value on social media through sharing their valuable content.

Utilities
In the context of exercising we are offering a product (a dumbbell) that adds value. Now exercising is a complex thing, and contains a lot of activities and operations that can be “helped” in addition to what the product itself can offer (the product on its own only offers added effect to the act of exercising itself). As an example this could be an exercising diary for registering dumbbell activity, or something outside of the exercising context with shared values: a healthy living eating plan, registering calories and giving you feedback on “needed” dumbbell activity in order to burn of appropriate amount of calories.

Now I agree, the examples aren’t that great, but hopefully they give a clear idea of what value is. The thing to understand is that this has so little to do with our traditional perception of communication, because it enters the concept of marketing from the other side. It’s not about the company finding new ways to talk about their stuff. The goal is to understand people’s everyday life, and how our product (or brand) can become an important and valuable part of that.

I’ll try to sum it up in a sentences:

Value is:
Adding something to an experience, making it better, enhancing it or adding new concepts to it.

I believe it’s important to take notice, because the new marketing landscape is about earning ownership of the experiences where your products are used and brands are shaped. And Losing on these arenas has far greater consequences than loosing out in a standard format banner ad space.

As the media, information and conversational world is changing, why are the business models of the media industry standing still?

In a slightly simplified and stereotypical take on the media industry I’m trying to explain both the new mindset of digital marketing (called “everyday life” in the presentation), and point out how this could affect the way the media industry starts thinking about their products (companies and marketers, not readers).

View the slideshow here, or find it below.

And as always, individual slides under CC to be found here.