The Culture of Asymmetric Marketing:
Enabling Marketing Management by Values (MMBV) through ‘Culture Management Systems’

Joseph E. Bentzel, Founder
Asymmetri Inc.

‘The ‘Get Real’ or Candor Values Component of MMBV

Having begun walking down the path to marketing sobriety and completed a first draft ‘Culture Gap Assessment’, perhaps in partnership with a trusted consulting organization, the second values attractor you want to embed in your sales and marketing culture is what I call the ‘Get Real’ or candor component. Getting real sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s not as simple as it seems. We have a business culture in the U.S. that puts whistleblowers on the cover of Time Magazine but doesn’t listen to them in time to fix the problems of the company.

Learning from the Culture of HROs
Psychologist Karl E. Weick, a break-through thinker on the topic of organizational performance, points to high reliability organizations (HROs) as leading examples of what I call ‘get real’ cultures. HROs operate in market environments where Big Hat No Cattle execution is not considered an option, e.g. nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, hospital emergency rooms, special operations units in the military (SEALs, Rangers, Delta Force, Green Berets, etc) and fire and first responder units like the FDNY. In an interview in the Harvard Business Review, Weick says, “The big difference between HROs and other organizations is the sensitivity or mindfulness with which people in most HROs react to even very weak signs that some kind of change or danger is approaching.” This concept of mindfulness of change or vulnerability is a core idea that asymmetric marketers need to embrace in the new uncertainty as a foundation for developing competitive strategy and fixing internal vulnerability, i.e. weak products, ineffective sales people, disaffected partners, poor reputation equity. It is what I mean by a ‘get real’ culture of sales and marketing.

Weick continues, “Everyday problems escalate to disaster status very quickly when people don’t respond appropriately to signs of trouble. HROs distinguish themselves by being able to detect incredibly weak warning signs and then taking decisive action.” Contrast this concept of pre-emptive mindfulness with many risk-averse cultures in the technology industry where market vulnerability and cultures of non-execution are not discussed internally because of the blame game. I call it the tiger inside/pussycat outside syndrome. It’s a syndrome where team members and even management get aggressive with people who raise important cultural issues, while treating competitors with kid gloves and letting customers walk all over them. Asymmetric marketers foster marketing cultures that embrace candor and creative conflict, and organize themselves around behavioral rituals and cultural artifacts that serve as early warning signals. This is a characteristic of traditional high technology entrepreneurism and was best captured in a sound bite by retired Intel CEO Andrew S. Grove in his observation that ‘only the paranoid survive’. In the sandstorm economy, we must all be a lot more paranoid and ‘mindful’. ‘Execution’ authors Bossidy and Charan, mentioned above, also point to the need for ‘reality’ and ‘robust dialogue’ as a key element of a healthy operating culture.

Companies that are not paranoid or practice get real mindfulness or ‘robust dialogue’ tend to get competitively punished, even market leaders. I remember having a discussion over 10 years ago with a leading marketing executive at WordPerfect. I asked him if he had an OEM marketing program to counter Microsoft’s own desktop apps effort, which at that time of our discussion was just getting off the ground. He said ‘We don’t need that. We are the overwhelming market share leaders in word processing software, we have ‘top of mind’ brand equity, and we command premium prices. Why would we want to do that?”, he concluded. He could have used a little more paranoia.

If Microsoft Can Get Real, Anybody Can
Despite being the best capitalized and most dominant player in its category (a state that often lends itself to competitive denial), Microsoft practices its own flavor of a get real culture. You can’t practice asymmetric marketing for as long as they have without it. For example, one aspect of Microsoft’s asymmetric advantage is their proven ability to not just retain customers but to systematically migrate those customers to new revenue models by locking them in. In 2003, Microsoft introduced a new multi-year ‘subscription model’ licensing plan for enterprise server customers designed to improve their revenue visibility in the sandstorm economy. This was a key market initiative and will no doubt be imitated by many other software companies with enough asymmetric customer advantage to pull it off. But Microsoft initially met with stiff resistance from customers who perceived the new subscription model as a price increase. The Microsoft culture was ‘mindful’ of the potential competitive negatives of this customer resistance which according the Yankee Group was as high as 60%. They got real and tweaked the licensing model, throwing in new service and support capabilities for free, and changed the basis for counting licenses from the per processor approach (which is their historic cultural legacy) to one that customers felt was more fair. Bill Gates open dialog around Microsoft security vulnerabilities represents the same mindfulness of the market. If Microsoft can practice getting real and being mindful, smaller weaker players absolutely must practice it as a foundation for achieving an asymmetric market advantage.

Getting Real Helps Board Governance at NASDAQ ‘Publates’
In a perfect world, publicly traded corporations (and VC funded startups) have outside directors who should be fostering a get real culture as part of their oversight function. But in fact many publicly traded companies systematically ignore or suppress warning signs of trouble, even with the most well-intentioned outside directors. I call them publates. Publates is a word I created to describe a publicly traded corporation that is culturally managed by a particular CEO as a private company. Part ‘public’ part ‘private, hence publate. Here’s an anonymous portrait of Publate Company X, a 5 year old provider of e-business application software.

Company X is an established market share leader in its category, yet it’ revenue has declined to about half of where it was at the end of calendar 2000. It has seemingly cut costs, laying off almost half it’s workforce yet still has not returned to operating profitability, having lost money in the last 10 quarters. These losses are principally related to desperation overspending on marketing and sales under the mantra of ‘demand creation’, denial of best practices and competitive dynamics in its category, and a comfortable cultural dependence on its war chest of cash.

The company has lost pricing power with its customer base and its offerings, while still ‘mission critical’, are becoming commoditized. To replace its commoditized business, Company X launched a number of new lines of business over the last few years, none of which has yet gained any traction or amounted to significant replacement revenue for the company. It also created ongoing revenue model problems for itself, desperately substituting large pre-paid licenses to ‘make the number’ while robbing its future revenue upside and accelerating its downward spiral. The CEO has also done a number of major acquisitions, none of which have been effectively integrated, none of which have even begun to pay for themselves. Large amounts of cash were used in these acquisition deals triggering the sale of one suddenly ‘non-strategic’ (yet surprisingly valuable) vertical software business asset to raise new capital. It’s funny how parts of your business can become non-strategic when you’ve become capital dependent and non-self-sufficient.

Getting more desperate, the company has begun adopting a go-it-alone mentality mistakenly reading the competitive dynamics of the category and going head to head with its traditional ecosystem partners, alienating them, and driving them closer and closer to directly competing with the company. While these ecosystem partners have not totally turned on the company, they are now openly supporting smaller competitors of the company, including some startups that have arisen in response to the company’s missteps. Company X has also strayed from its original high-value customization services model and has created new categories of channel partners who now receive the lion’s share of revenues on deals the company sends them thus accelerating the revenue downturn. With the stock price down and with institutional investors abandoning the company and trading in the stock at record low volumes, the CEO has fallen into the trap of micro-managing everything (like a private company), and has not unleashed the dormant competitive mindfulness of his organization.

Fortunately, many of the marketing and sales people in the middle of the company are instinctive asymmetric marketers with outstanding ideas who try to oppose the continuing revenue decline. But they don’t have an easy way to showcase their ideas to the board or the CEO, grow their own bottoms-up leadership, expand their internal market reputation and build a critical mass of support for positive but ‘get real’ ideas that could potentially turn the company around. What they and the thousands of other Nasdaq OTC publates need is the 2nd module of a Culture Management System.

Culture Management System Module 2: Marketing Community/Dialog Manager
What I recommend to embed the ‘get real’ principle and reinforce it on an hour by hour basis is an internet ‘marketing community system’ for the marketing and sales organization. With social software and social networking websites really coming of age, including discussion board technology, weblog systems, new categories of ‘bottom-up’ social applications (wiki) and more traditional ‘top down’ ECM (enterprise content management) and BPM (business process management) systems, cultural transformation inside corporate departments like the marketing/sales organization is at hand. You can deploy this technology on the marketing intranet or attach it to your SFA/CRM system to capture the creative conflict, informal conversation and mindfulness of your marketing, sales and business development knowledge workers while allowing them to grow their own ‘reputation equity’ and lead by example. At Asymmetri Incorporated, we provide consulting services to tailor these systems in ways that help foster real cultural transformation. These systems are especially helpful in cultures that seem to use email as a divisive tool of organizational factionalism. In extreme cases I’ve seen email become the digital version of the Pennsylvania Amish tradition of shunning. ‘You’ve been bad. You went off the reservation at the product review meeting. Nobody will talk to you until you repent’. Soon you’re not copied on the email, and you’re not part of the marketing ‘in crowd’.

Social software systems hold the potential to serve as a more effective alternative to email in terms of fostering a persistent conversation that can uncover cultural issues and do double duty as an attractor for the asymmetric marketers to come to the fore. In many cases, a critical mass of discussion board comments, weblog postings, or collaborative wiki-advantaged knowledge staring you in the face can serve as a powerful cultural artifact to keep the business on track.

In terms of fostering emergent leadership within the marketing and sales organization, culture management systems incorporating social software also build ‘reputation’ equity for the various contributors whose weblog entries, message board posts, and cumulative institutional memory are there for others to ‘swarm’ or ‘mob’ around. These systems also provide visibility for public company board members or VCs into the day-to-day operations and mindfulness of the company as an alternative to canned or filtered management presentations and reports. This direct visibility into the marketing and sales culture can only improve board, investor and stakeholder governance.

Part One: Introduction

Part Two: Post Bubble

Part Three: Getting Real

Part Four: Self-Organizing