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I. The Culture of Asymmetric Marketing
If A-marketing is about creating full spectrum market dominance programs for tech companies in the new uncertainty, then why start off by discussing the cultural dimension? Because you can’t do a-marketing without an a-marketing culture. Sun Tzu said you can’t do the ‘art of war’ without practicing the inner discipline of Taoist spiritual values. Tired of business books quoting Sun Tzu? As a colleague of mine says frequently, suck it up. OK, I can relate. How about Seinfeld?
Asymmetric Marketing Culture is Not ‘Bubbleboy Culture’
Remember the Seinfeld episode with the ‘Bubbleboy’? The Bubbleboy lived in an environmentally perfect, germ-free plastic bubble protected from the harsh realities of life. Unprepared for contact with real people from the real world, and frustrated from years inside a bubble, the Bubbleboy gets into verbal fisticuffs with George Costanza, Jerry’s argumentative friend, over a game of Trivial Pursuits. The verbal dueling turns into a mini-brawl and the Bubbleboy’s bubble bursts, exposing him to reality, and a trip to the hospital. Many tech and internet marketing executives have functioned in marketing cultures like the sanitary but highly insular world of the Bubbleboy. Their bubble was VC and IPO cash that artificially sustained them and protected them from the harsh realities of high technology entrepreneurism. You’ll hear a lot more of this rant, since many of the thought leaders of the new economy are still out there just waiting for ‘IT spending to improve’ so they can crawl back into the bubble, maybe a new dot gov federal pork barrel bubble.
Let me backtrack for a minute. An early draft sentence read, “This essay is about technology marketing in the new future of uncertainty.” I read that and said to myself, ‘you forgot the culture, Mr Dumb One’. The second draft revision had one little word changed. ‘This essay is about technology marketing warfare in the new future of uncertainty.’ Boots on the ground---Not Trivial Pursuits in the bubble.
In the spirit of Cramer’s “The Making of a Hawk”, asymmetric marketing culture is not politically correct marketing seeking to live insulated from the unfolding global war against terror and the resultant economic uncertainty. The simple challenge laid down by President George W. Bush, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’ ---is something that must find practical, day-to-day resonance in our industry since the entire future of the US (and western civilization) may in large part be based on the health and strategic leadership of the tech industry. This is a sobering idea. It should be a sobering idea.
A-marketing culture is about acknowledging that the critical strategic and tactical marketing functions in US high technology companies need to radically adapt to the new future of unexpected uncertainty, to get back to basics, to get tough, to get less politically correct and more ‘Israeli’, to integrate the Microsoft way of market dominance and the ‘Rumsfeld way’ of military dominance.
When startup companies are able to bootstrap themselves in risk averse, post-bubble venture capital-deficient environment, that’s asymmetric marketing culture. When dominant market leaders forcefully migrate their customers to their next release of code on their schedule around their business model, that’s a-marketing culture. When you design the concept of dominance into the full spectrum all of your marketing programs, that’s a-marketing culture. Aaaahhhhhhh, the relationship between vanquishing enemies and vanquishing competitors is starting to come into focus.
Obviously, Asymmetric Marketing Culture is Not ‘Symmetric Marketing’ Culture
Here’s the question that goes to the importance of culture. Why the hell did so many technology and internet startup companies manage to fail, die, go bust, get liquidated for pennies, in spite of raising a billion, a hundred million, or several millions of dollars in seed, VC or IPO capital? I know I asked myself that question……….many times. And that’s when the Bubbleboy metaphor occurred to me. I’ve spoken to hundreds and hundreds of VP level tech types who complain that the VCs ‘pulled the plug on us’ like George Costanza on the Bubbleboy.
But how could these companies fail. Weren’t they ‘perfect startups’ in an age of perfect startups. Perfect MBA teams handpicked by perfect MBA VCs, taken public by perfect investment bankers, validated by perfect analysts with perfect analysis, with all the resources needed to build perfect products and services. Perfect and symmetric.
Here’s the sense in which I am using the term symmetry or symmetric marketing. X=Y. X equals Y is a nice little equation in which X equals the amount of money raised through angels, VCs, IPOs, investment bankers, etc. Y equals the amount of time you get to exist as a going company prior to simply ceasing to exist. By the way, the day after Barron’s pointed this out in an article in 2000 stating that many internet companies were going to run out of cash before achieving self-sufficiency, the Bubbleboys were busted and the party was over. I’ve seen the movie eDreams, chronicling the rise and fall of Kozmo.com more than a few times now. It’s a documentary on ‘symmetric marketing’ that keeps me laughing, actually howling at the ‘pre IPO party’ that ‘rocked’ and the IPO that never happened despite the ‘market validation’ of raising and burning through a couple hundred million bucks or so in VC money. Kozmo.com is the X=Y poster child…wait, or was that Webvan, or GovWorks……Sorry. Just having a little fun with a serious subject.
In a company that gets hooked on capital-dependent ‘bubbleboy’ marketing it’s all about perfection. The Bubbleboy marketers spun perfect business models with ‘new rules’. They nestled within perfect VC-brokered ‘keiretsu’ relationships. They spent the farm on ‘perfectly cool’ brands. They paid analysts to build perfectly symmetrical abstract constructs like independent B2B ‘net markets’ that failed to attract a critical mass of buyers or sellers, or the perfectly vertical portals and e-tailers that were locking in non-existent ‘landgrabs’ on non-existent turf. And let’s not forget the perfect ‘incubators’ that failed to foster ‘synergy’, a word that became a symmetric marketing religion with it’s own symmetric marketing Taliban. Remember the AOL Time Warner merger press conference? Synergy on steroids. Wait don’t steroids have side effects?
Bubbleboys Practiced ‘Cargo Cult’ Entrepreneurism
In 1974, renowned physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement address at CalTech he called ‘Cargo Cult Science’. In his speech Feynman tells the following story of a group of south sea islanders. “During the war they (the islanders) saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to (serve as) headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.”
The failed startups and crashed IPOs of the dotcom bubble were what I call cargo cult entrepreneurism. The marketing behaviors of deceased dotcoms and troubled technology companies are very much like Feynman’s description of a cargo cult. Despite doing 'everything right’, i.e. getting funded ‘at a killer valuation’, ‘launching’, ‘partnering’, branding, etc., hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of them went out of business over the 3 year period between 2000 to 2003.
But cargo cults and bubbleboy marketing were not just confined to startups of that period. It was a more widespread disease. Even giant ‘brick and mortar’ companies brought into the story in the pursuit of e-dreams. Enron to name one. Magazine cover perfect, perfect in every way, perfectly symmetric, hailed by every analyst on the planet, Enron. Enron floated major internet businesses that were ‘funded’ by their ‘brick and mortar assets’ and a series of off-balance sheet, 3rd party-funded ventures, not retained earnings or self-generated capital. Then they lied about it to the world and had their ‘new economy business model gurus’, Andersen Consulting, validate it. Hmmmmmmmmm.
Cargo cults are still very much alive. I’ve heard media personality Howard Stern joke on his morning radio show of a group of primitive jungle dwellers who came into possession of a case of his book “Private Parts’ and a box of his signature hippie sunglasses. They now worship him as god. Lesson. New high technology cargo cults will arise around the e-government transformation, as bubbleboy marketers return and hunt through the imaginary digital pork barrel looking for easy bucks.
Hate the Game, Not the Player
Am I criticizing or knocking the scores upon scores of thousands of marketing folks who participated in the bubbleboy companies. No. I say ‘hate the game, not the player’ , because bubbleboy marketing is like an addiction. A big well-funded monkey on your back.
In any addictive process there is a false sense of control. High technology leadership, particularly entrepreneurial leadership, is fundamentally about winning in an environment of uncertainty, not about 4 perfect rounds of capital and a perfectly handpicked team.
One characteristic common to addicts is the compulsion to attempt to gain control over the destructive behaviors associated with their ‘disease’. The perfectly symmetrical bubbleboy startups tried to engineer artificial ‘germ-free’ certainty into the entrepreneurial process using public IPOs as another round of venture capital. Shifting the burden of entrepreneurial risk onto public markets, while giving their buddies ‘friends and family’ IPO stock. Here are a few of the symptoms of the cargo cult marketing they championed.
Capital Dependency: Bubbleboy marketers are highly dependent on capital. To move past capital dependency, asymmetric marketers strive for self-sufficiency and work hard to ‘customer-fund’ their businesses from day one, (or day one of their self-help recovery program if they are grateful recovering symmetric marketers like me).
Go-It-Alone-ism: Despite all the artificial partner press announcements, bubbleboy marketing programs are often conceived in a vacuum. Too much money often does that, producing a go-it-alone mentality that leads to isolation and the wrong ‘whole products’. A-marketers know that their future customers are already someone else’s customers right now. Like good ‘predators’, they attach to a living ecosystem to hunt for sustenance.
Overspending: The dotcom and tech meltdown was all about overspending, not tried and true entrepreneurial bootstrapping. Ludicrously expensive and low yielding portal advertising deals, highly compensated interactive marketing agencies (many of which are now gone), and big direct sales staffs with ‘killer rolodexes’ were the norm. By contrast, a-marketers spend on small, highly trained, highly motivated cadre of’ special ops’ sales and marketing professionals, who speak the language of full spectrum market dominance, and work together in new cross-organizational teams.
Hold Turf: Bubbleboy marketers were turf-bound. They saw various technology categories and emerging categories as static and played defense when they should have been bypassing the small towns and coverging on the digital Bagdhad. A-marketers define categories as dynamic and continuously evolving. They seek to gain ‘air superiority’ by establishing a market no-fly-zone over competitive spaces.
A-priori products: Bubbleboy marketing startups have engineering organizations that build whole products to specifications developed a-priori by ‘experts’. A-marketers co-create products and services with their customers, and know intuitively that it ain’t a product if somebody doesn’t buy it.
Brand-centric: Bubbleboy marketers get addicted to abstract discussions about brand equity. Enron brand equity, Andersen brand equity, evaporated within days. A-marketers focus on the conversation and the reputation and want to provide opportunities for customers and prospects to co-create the messaging agenda. That’s the Martha Stewart lesson. Disappointment and disillusionment hit hard. An implosion of confidence in a brand is directly related to the earlier strength of the brand. You’ll never get to marketing heaven if you break my customer heart. A-marketers place ‘reputational uncertainty management’ at the top of their agenda.
Focus: Bubbleboy marketers are market control freaks and think non-linear complexity-driven, self-organizing, customer-evangelized market development is bad. I guess they never heard of eBay. So they worship the concept of ‘focus’. ‘Now you go focus on books Mr. Amazon.com. Don’t diversify. Don’t become a commerce services provider for your retail competitors’, carped some of the bubbleboy analyst thought leaders. A-marketers understand that non-linear diversification is the natural consequence of ‘locking in’ customers and migrating those relationships up a rugged fitness landscape of uncertainty. Asymmetric marketers learn to walk and chew gum at the same time.
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Like marketing Neanderthals, the DNA of symmetric, bubbleboy marketers will eventually be gone from the high tech marketing gene pool by virtue of the shakeout itself. But bubbleboy DNA, and the symptoms outlined above, are still out there and it’s out there at a time when tech companies need to become more rugged, more dominant, more committed than ever, in order to become second to none in an industry second to none. In future essays, I will get more into the culture of the eFront, but for now, let’s move on to the next dimension of a-marketing, the dimension of ‘context’, because that is what is forcefully hastening the process of change.
Copyright 2001-2003, Joseph E. Bentzel. All Rights Reserved.
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