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

Joseph E. Bentzel, Founder
Asymmetri Inc.

Introduction: the ‘Sandstorm’ Economy

“There's been such tremendous talk about how many firemen came to the WTC (World Trade Center) on their own and these did contribute to our fatalities because they themselves became fatalities. The answer is yes it's a shame and it's unfortunate that we didn't have better discipline within the department, where we would have assured they would have all reported to a staging area or a central location, but when you think about it, it's part of our culture as firefighters to do exactly what they did. That's why they did it. It's that mental attitude that enables a normal person, which is what a firefighter is, just a normal person, male or female, to go into a burning building. That's what keeps the fire department running, that mental attitude.” Al Turi, Chief of Safety FDNY (Fire Department of New York)

The organizational machinery of the Fire Department of New York came under the most severe attack in its history on September 11th, 2001. But the culture of the FDNY prevailed and the firefighters ‘self-organized’ to save lives, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that organizational values are not abstract, but extremely tangible. In the face of calamity and command/control confusion, culture and shared values are what came to the fore creating an asymmetry of will that drove action. That’s a powerful lesson that the frontline first responders of September 11th in the New York Fire Department, Police Department and other public service organizations can teach management and marketing professionals in the technology industry who want to build momentum-rich businesses in the ongoing IT uncertainty I call the ‘sandstorm’ economy.

In my essay, ‘Asymmetric Marketing: Winning in the New Uncertainty’, I describe the post-bubble, post-9.11, post-ethics scandal IT spending environment as a ‘sandstorm’ economy. I use the metaphor of the sandstorm to focus attention on the context of on-again/off-again, quarter-to-quarter marketing and sales uncertainty facing more than a few high technology companies. One moment, talking heads, analysts and pundits declare a new bull market in technology and renewed business demand for information technology. In the next moment, things may not be so rosy after all, especially for those companies whose sales and marketing organizations have not come to terms with the new reality of IT spending or learned how to detect emergent ‘sandstorm opportunity’. For sales and marketing professionals in the technology industry, the key characteristics of the sandstorm economy are:

• Fuzzy Revenue Visibility: In a desert sandstorm it becomes difficult to see very far in front of one’s own nose. In a tech markets sandstorm it becomes difficult to gain forward revenue visibility. This is why forward revenue guidance at a wide cross-section of tech companies in many categories continues to be cautious and uncertain. New ways of effectively coping with quarter-to-quarter market uncertainty are needed inside sales and marketing organizations in order to creatively drive locked in, predictable revenue growth in the low-visibility sandstorm. New management tools are also needed. In the early phases of the Iraq conflict, American soldiers, temporarily blinded by the desert storm, relied on GPS navigational systems to literally find their way around inside their own camps while preparing to leverage the low visibility of the storm to capture an asymmetric advantage over their opponents. Similarly, smart marketing and sales organizations should deploy and customize internet community or social software as culture management systems (CMS) to communicate and collaborate more effectively in the ongoing uncertainty of tech markets. Culture management systems can augment sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems and capitalize on the significant investments tech companies have made in these technologies. While SFA/CRM systems provide a window into revenue visibility in many companies, they would be more formidable marketing weapons if they had the ammunition that comes from a mobilized and healthy marketing culture of performance that drives self-organized execution. I will go into the concept of CMS, or culture management systems throughout this essay.
  

• Board and Investor ‘Heat’: Intense heat is being generated in the tech markets sandstorm as it is in a desert sandstorm. This heat comes from growing board and investor oversight of and intervention into the day-to-day operations of CEOs and senior marketing/sales executives. In the post-Enron environment this intervention will only intensify as regulatory agencies and new CGOs (chief governance officers) impose more and more transparency on management teams. For senior marketing and sales leadership, there is a danger of falling into the trap of the bubble, i.e. marketing for investor perception, which is often thinly disguised as managing for shareholder value. Marketing for investor perception dehydrates sales and marketing organizations and their cultures, taxes the resources of key sales and marketing managers and personnel and takes them away from their fundamental execution responsibility to improve marketing performance. While financial and operational transparency may be good for investors and regulators, it is bad for what I call ‘stealth’ marketing, one key element of any winner-take-all or asymmetric marketing strategy in the sandstorm economy. Cultural transformation inside marketing and sales departments will need to occur to simultaneously manage stakeholder transparency and stealth-advantaged marketing performance.
  

• Broken Marketing & Sales Machinery Creates Culture Gap: In desert sandstorms modern complex machinery tends to break down frequently. So too in the tech markets sandstorm. Morale-reducing layoffs and frequent re-organizations have been the order of the day for more than a few technology marketing and sales organizations in the period since the bursting of the dot com bubble in early 2000. This has often created cultures of silence, fear, resentment, timid execution, blame, non-collaboration, risk aversion and paralyzing political correctness disguised as workforce diversity inside many tech marketing and sales organizations. Taken together, these symptoms of broken sales and marketing machinery are what I call the sales and marketing culture gap, i.e. the gap between marketing vision and a culture of non-execution through which both scarce marketing resources and precious customer prospects fall. It’s been my practical experience that this sales and marketing culture gap is a primary reason for the absence of market momentum in many companies. A friend of mine refers to this culture gap between strategy and execution as a classic case of what Texans call ‘Big Hat, No Cattle’, i.e. grand marketing vision, with anemic performance and execution. Big Hat, No Cattle marketing organizations reached epidemic proportions in the bubble years, and many people who were exposed to this epidemic continue to serve today in more established tech companies bringing bubble values and ‘bubbleboy’ culture into their new jobs. I use the term bubbleboys to describe those companies whose marketing and sales cultures were created in a cash-rich VC-funded cocoon away from the harsh realities of the marketplace, i.e. the need for products, profitability and locked-in customers. Unfortunately, the cultural values of the bubbleboys seeped into the marketing and sales organizations of many surviving companies.
  

• Desertification of Technology Spending: While sandstorms are natural phenomena in arid regions, they are also magnified by human factors called desertification. Scientists describe desertification as the process whereby human beings systematically over-cultivate a given landscape making it even more arid, thus accelerating the onset of recurring sandstorms. I see tech industry desertification reflected in the thousands of new economy companies in emerging categories that have dried up and died in the 2000-2003 post-bubble period, and the corresponding contraction of the industry support infrastructure of venture capitalists and other investors. Desertification is also expressed in the debate within IT circles over the current role of information technology as ‘commoditized cost of business’ or ‘strategic competitive advantage’. This debate, initiated by Harvard Business Review editor Nicholas Carr (IT Doesn’t Matter, May 2003 HBR) exposes a growing culture shift in how IT organizations have reacted to their management’s imperative to control costs. Carr’s analysis, in brief, is that the IT build-out of the 90’s is nearer to the end than the beginning, and recommends that IT executives become slower to move, and more tight-fisted and creative in working with technology providers. In other words, Carr’s outstanding analysis is a wake up call for IT management to become instinctively more resistant to vendor marketing hype. Carr’s advice, to which smart tech marketer’s should pay close attention, is to adopt defensive IT strategies around the potential risk of business interruption vs. chasing the next technology hype cycle that touts ‘strategic advantage’. This view seems to be validated by a recent Forrester Brief (Oct. 2003) that surveyed a wide cross-section of CIOs and found that security and disaster recovery upgrades were perceived as ‘job one’ or top priorities for 2004. From my perspective as an advisor to technology marketers, I see the HBR-instigated debate as an early indicator of a healthy IT immune system reaction to the false or misleading value propositions of many bubble era tech marketers for whom every website widget was a strategic breakthrough. These challenges of evolving IT culture and tech industry desertification presented by the sandstorm economy require a fundamental rethinking of the culture of sales and marketing within technology companies. The insight provided by Carr’s essay really points to an evolutionary culture change in IT that will demand that technology companies embed more rugged, traditional, ‘bootstrap’ or ‘garage’ entrepreneurial cultural values in their sales and marketing organizations in order to compete more honestly and effectively for the oases of new sandstorm opportunities that emerge from this culture shift in IT.
  
  

Summing up, I see the technology industry sandstorm economy as the new cultural imperative of IT spending for large and medium corporations and the corresponding new reality of fuzzy revenue visibility and perpetual uncertainty for technology marketing professionals who own the challenge of selling into this environment.

In essay that follows, I will present my views on what I call the culture of asymmetric marketing. My experience as a marketing professional, illuminated by the best practices of tech category leaders, has taught me that a healthy marketing culture is the essential foundation for executing asymmetric marketing strategy and tactics. Centuries ago, legendary Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote that ‘the Way’ (the Taoist philosophy and cultural values of his day) was the foundation for the victories of wise generals. The values of traditional tech bootstrapped garage entrepreneurism, as distinct from the intoxicated sales and marketing cultures of the tech bubble, constitute a way or positive cultural heritage for the challenges we face today as companies and as an industry.

The Sandstorm: An Industry Contraction with a Cultural Cause
According to respected Indian-American venture capitalist Promod Haque, "We’re in a massive contraction phase that’s unparalleled. Of course, the boom was an aberration too, so I’m glad the correction is taking place. We’re going back to the early 1990’s in the hi-tech sector.”

By way of review, the ‘correction’ Promod Haque refers to include the following:

• Close to 5000 VC or IPO funded businesses shut down or were gobbled up in the 3 years between 2000 and 2003 according to market research organization WebMergers;
• The venture capital (VC) industry has contracted from 2500 firms to around 1000 in the same time frame;
• Silicon Valley unemployment is among the highest in the nation with hundreds of thousands of marketing, service and engineering knowledge workers out of work according to BrassRing, a leading provider of recruitment services;
• Despite cash settlements, hundreds of class action lawsuits continue to deflect management team attention at many public tech companies, while a leading investment banker of the tech and internet bubble remains under a cloud of suspicion, even after his prosecution ended in a mistrial.
  
  

According to Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker, authors of the Deviant’s Advantage, How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets, “All business problems are really culture problems in more than one sense of the word.” So when a prominent VC like Promod Haque talks about ‘going back to the 90’s’, I translate that statement as meaning going back to the traditional entrepreneurial cultural values that made the U.S high tech industry second to none. My own strongly held view is that it was an erosion of traditional entrepreneurial tech culture that led to the contraction described above, and that the wreckage from this contraction was not confined to the now-departed WebVan, Kozmo.com, GovWorks and untold others. Many emerging category survivors of the period of the technology bubble still remain non-self-sufficient, money-losing, capital-dependent companies who continue to struggle with marketing and sales execution in the new uncertainty.

The role of culture as the foundation of execution is beginning to take on even more importance in the new uncertainty I call the sandstorm economy. According to sales performance research conducted in 2003 (Selling in Turbulent Times) by management consulting organization Accenture:

• 56% of senior executives described the performance of their sales organizations as ‘average, worse than normal, or catastrophic’. While the Accenture study covered a wide cross-section of industries, this finding alone should serve an execution wake up call for marketing and sales professionals in the tech industry.

Additional findings in the Accenture study point straight to the heart of sales and marketing organizational culture, and a seeming lack of cultural preparedness for coping with the new reality of on-again/off-again market uncertainty.

• 58% surveyed said their sales organizations were ‘stuck in the past’;
• 55% found it difficult to assess which leads were ‘qualified’;
• 47% said sales leads often ‘fell through the cracks’.
  
  

The Accenture findings are extremely relevant to technology companies whose sales and marketing organizations became soft during the artificial demand and bloated IT spending of the bubble. Sales and marketing organizations ‘stuck in the past’, who can’t identify a ‘qualified lead’ or whose operating culture allows leads to ‘fall through the cracks’ in the middle of an economic contraction----these are execution effects that are clear expressions of the absence of strong sales and marketing cultural values.

My own day-to-day experience validates these findings. I often come across sales and marketing leadership that will enthusiastically discuss a perceived market gap, while remaining absolutely silent about the ever-widening culture gap inside their own organizations. These same leaders want to create customer communities and hold 'market conversations' without creating internal marketing communities and holding the candid, ‘get real’ internal conversations that always precede effective market conversation. They want to collaborate across enterprise boundaries with partners and customers but don't really know how to collaborate across departmental boundaries with each other. They want to reward the customer for buying but don't know how to reward the whole organization for selling. In other words, they are not culturally prepared for marketing warfare in the sandstorm economy.

I call it my sandstorm epiphany….the little everyday event in this new reality of geopolitical uncertainty that got me focused on thinking about the key elements of successful marketing cultures, and the importance of marketing and sales organizations migrating to a more values-based approach to marketing and sales strategy and execution. About one month after the 9.11 terrorist attacks, I was sitting in a business class seat on my now bankrupt favorite airline as the flight attendant delivered the meal service, you know, the good meal you get when you are lucky enough to upgrade to business class. As I looked down at the tray I saw the airline rubber chicken I had ordered like a good Atkins diet fanatic. Then I saw it….The totally out-of-context post 9.11 plastic airline knife sitting next to the metal fork and metal spoon. I thought to myself, OK, I can do this. I can cut this rubber airline chicken with this plastic airline knife. Chop, chop, chop, chop, nothing. I dented it a little and wished I had ordered the high carb, non-Atkins ravioli. Frustrated and hungry, I improvised. I picked up the chicken in my hands gaining a clear but unorthodox asymmetric advantage over my hunger. Trust me when I say that eating chicken in your hands is not business class behavior, and I saw a few passengers cringe as I did it.

As I ate the chicken with my hands and wallowed in my business class shame, I thought about the post-bubble high tech turnaround assignment I was on at that time and it suddenly occurred to me that the post-bubble marketing culture of my client was a lot like a little plastic out-of-context airline knife trying to cut through the tough, intractable rubber chicken of uncertain IT demand. A little denting, a little splatter on the shirt, a lot of regret about the ravioli, but very little protein gets consumed, unless you get your hands dirty, unless you approach things in an unconventional way. Translation. For high technology marketers in the context of the new uncertainty I call the sandstorm economy, the first and primary asymmetry you need to leverage is the asymmetry of will, of values, of culture. And you need to be prepared to ‘go back to the 90’s’ to transform the ‘business class’ culture of your company in order to make that asymmetry of will a market reality.

Sandstorm Execution via Marketing Management by Values (MMBV)
When I use the terms culture or values, I am not referring to the often lofty, always politically correct, chronically abstract Corporate Values statements you often see pinned to cafeteria walls up and down the Silicon Valley. Effective marketing and sales organizational cultures are not based on this kind of ‘values’ statement. As the experience of the FDNY on September 11th indicates, there is nothing abstract about culture, or the concept of management by values (MBV) that sees culture as the principal driver of organizational behavior in times of uncertainty and threat, whether that threat is from terrorists, competitors, or a natural evolutionary change in the culture and buying patterns of IT organizations. Against the background of limited revenue visibility, broken organizational machinery, and investor heat, a values-based (MBV) orientation often works to transform culture and drive execution, while traditional MBO (management by objectives) or MBI (management by instruction) sometimes has the unintended effect of band-aiding over the broken cultural machinery. I think that when CEOs and senior management openly comment in the Accenture study that their sales organizations are ‘stuck in the past’, what they are really saying is that they are not equipped with the right execution values for successful sales and marketing programs at this point in history. Market leaders like Intuit and Yahoo, for example, have openly moved to embrace the concept of management by values. The Chief Marketing Officers of both companies led a discussion at the CMO Council event in San Francisco (September 2003) titled ‘Branding from the Inside Out’ focusing on how each company’s core operating values were critical in their overall marketing performance. (For more on the CMO Council go to cmocouncil.org)

Building a rugged culture of asymmetric marketing requires what I call a Marketing Management by Values (MMBV) approach so that marketing and sales organizations can execute more effectively in the uncertainty of the sandstorm economy. In their popular book, ‘Execution, The Discipline of Getting Things Done’, authors Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan make the following powerful argument: “Most efforts at cultural change fail because they are not linked to improving the business’s outcomes. The ideas and tools of cultural change are fuzzy and disconnected from strategic and operational realities. To change a business’s culture, you need a set of processes---social operating mechanisms---that will change the beliefs and behavior of people in ways that are directly linked to bottom-line results.” One approach to culture change for tech marketing and sales organizations is to translate Bossidy and Charan’s important concept of social operating mechanisms into tangible culture management systems that can embed and reinforce traditional entrepreneurial process values in their organizations one day at a time. These process values (as distinct from higher order values like ‘innovation’, ‘customer satisfaction’, ‘leadership’, etc) can help organizations close the ‘marketing and sales culture gap’ through which falls new prospects, precious marketing resources and any chance of being a long-term category leader. To quote the Yankee Group, “The key processes to focus on to make sales successful involve the interplay of sales and marketing.”

Over the course of my work I have isolated 4 basic underlying ‘process values components’ that often appear to be organically embedded in healthy sales and marketing cultures in the tech industry. In fact, these values components are basic cultural process building blocks in a Marketing Management by Values (MMBV) approach to executing effectively in the sandstorm economy. These values components of asymmetric marketing culture are:

• Sobriety: No I don’t mean abstinence from alcohol. I mean business culture sobriety as in a non-dysfunctional approach to the challenge of marketing strategy and sales execution in the sandstorm. Why raise the issue of cultural sobriety in marketing and sales organizations? Because the bubble legacy, not traditional tech entrepreneurism, still remains the dominant culture inside many tech sales and marketing organizations. The bubble was all about ‘non-sober’ marketing culture and intoxicated marketing and sales cost structures that were a clear departure from the values of traditional tech entrepreneurism. My day-to-day working analysis of the effects of the dotcom bubble and the current cultural challenges of tech companies proceeds from the viewpoint that the bubble was essentially the largest single epidemic of mass gambling addiction and dysfunctional business behavior in modern history. While this observation may seem controversial, I use it because there’s a lot the addiction treatment industry and related recovery movement can teach marketers about common sense business ‘process sobriety’ and one-day-at-a-time execution. Section I of this essay describes the importance of a ‘culture gap assessment’ as the first step in fostering a ‘sober’ asymmetric marketing culture. The culture gap assessment creates a baseline culture requirements analysis, the starting point for a culture management system that can help keep your marketing and sales team ‘process sober’ in the ongoing uncertainty of the sandstorm.
  

• ‘Get Real’ Candor: The second values component of MMBV is what I call the ‘get real’ or candor component. In a get real culture of asymmetric marketing, you don’t shoot the messenger for internally discussing your competitive vulnerability, silence them for that big idea that may be just a little outside the cultural box, or send them to an organizational gulag for pointing out that there may be a gigantic gap between strategy and execution in your marketing and sales organization. In an MMBV-driven organization that seeks asymmetric market dominance, you reward him or her for getting real. Getting real goes to the issue of How to think, not simply what to think. Much of conventional MBO-driven marketing culture is about what to think while unconventional or asymmetric marketing culture is about how to think. At Asymmetri Incorporated, while I and my associates may work with a client on marketing strategy or communications campaign, a new product or a new brand, a partner program or a business model, a sales event or trade show, an e-commerce or e-business website, we always strive to move the client beyond the ‘what to think’ phase of the project and quickly get to the ‘how to think’ phase. Marketing and sales cultures that focus on how to think vs. what to think foster the emergence of high reliability ‘armies of one’, i.e. responsible, experienced, hands-on marketing and sales warriors who can function effectively even in a no-huddle-offense environment. Section II of this essay describes the ‘get real’ component and the importance of using modern e-community and self-publishing technology and new classes of ‘social software’ to foster a get real culture and culture management system.
  

• Self-Organizing: Asymmetric culture is what people in the military call a force multiplier. A true asymmetric force multiplier is created when culture drives individuals to ‘swarm’ on the problem, as did the FDNY on 9.11. Traditional organizational structures like sales, marketing, business development, etc. are often like having discrete and stovepiped ‘armies, navies and air forces’. Stovepiped structures do not catalyze force multiplier organizations and are not sufficient for the marketing challenges of the new IT uncertainty. By contrast, modern asymmetric warfare often relies on special operations teams (Rangers, SEALS, Delta Force, etc.) that are empowered to ‘self-organize’ around a mission and practice joint war fighting in concert with the conventional military organizations. Similarly, marketing and sales organizations can foster leadership, self-organized team building, cross-stovepipe collaboration, and higher levels of organizational agility in demanding and uncertain market environments if the right values are in place. Section III of this essay describes the self-organizing component of an MMBV orientation and the importance of ‘swarming’ ‘mobbing’ or ‘concentrating superior force’ on sales and marketing problems by mobilizing the markets inside your company via collaborative workspace technologies and regular ‘internal market management’ rituals as part of your culture management system.
  

• Ownership: In healthy marketing cultures, positive execution momentum is palpable. You can feel it in the air and it seems to be ‘owned’ by everybody. One thing all marketing and sales professionals agree on is that momentum is definitely not created and shared ownership is not in place when ‘leads fall through the cracks’ or confusion as to what constitutes a ‘qualified prospect’ is the general state of your sales and marketing culture, as the Accenture study uncovered. Marketing culture can become healthier if what you measure and compensate reinforces shared ‘ownership’ behaviors and values that produce positive momentum. Sales and marketing momentum and shared ownership as a process value often flow naturally from the cross-silo collaboration and unconventional team selling approaches that succeed in the sandstorm economy. These need to be rewarded appropriately and systematically. In all likelihood, a culture of shared ownership in an MMBV orientation will be rewarded much differently than traditional MBO-driven ‘sales rep quota’-defined cultures and will need conscious management support to succeed, especially in an era where incentive stock option programs are changing at many companies. Section IV will describe the ownership rewards and incentives component of a culture management system that drives execution momentum. Shared ownership reward systems will also work to dynamically reinforce the ‘sobriety’, ‘get real’ and ‘self-organizing’ values you seek to embed in your new MMBV-driven marketing and sales organization.
  
  

Culture Management Systems: Social Software-Based Artifacts & Rituals that Serve as Internal Market ‘Attractors’
Cultural differentiation has always served as a key marketing ‘attractor’ for politicians, media personalities and companies. Bill Clinton playing his sax on MTV is one kind of political cultural attractor. George W. Bush landing a plane on the deck of an aircraft carrier is another kind of political cultural attractor. CNN’s Larry King pitching softball questions to friendly Hollywood guests is one kind of media cultural attractor. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly confronting hostile guests in a ‘no spin zone’ is another kind of media cultural attractor. A well-funded Napster (not the ‘new’ one, the original) seeking to ‘overthrow’ the music industry is one kind of marketing cultural attractor. Akamai refusing to provide services to the Al Jazeera pro-terror propaganda machine is another kind of marketing cultural attractor. Akamai founder Daniel Lewin was murdered by terrorists on September 11th and as a result Akamai, at least in the case of Al Jazeera, has rejected cultural neutrality in their customer marketing approach.

Modern complexity (or chaos) theory is one of the key theoretical foundations of asymmetric marketing and serves as way to understand powerful internet processes, e.g. the unstoppable momentum of the self-organizing trading community called eBay. But it’s also a powerful way to think about how culture and values get embedded in an organization. One of the most valuable concepts in complexity theory is the concept of ‘attractors’. From the standpoint of culture, attractors are the seemingly invisible rituals, artifacts and mythmaking that serve to spontaneously catalyze cultural order and facilitate self-organized execution. The systematic cultivation of these attractors inside an organization using a combination of social software and collaboration technology combined with professional culture gap assessment is the key to what I mean by enabling a Marketing Management by Values (MMBV) culture, a pre-condition for asymmetric marketing leadership in the ongoing sandstorm.

Cultural artifacts and rituals are not just tangible, they’re ‘sticky’ and tied directly on the high speed bus architecture of the brain to emotional reality, which is what gives them so much power and so much potential to drive self-organized action. As I write these words, I am wearing a rugby shirt with the slogan ‘no huddle offense’. The shirt was a gift from a client, a CMO actively working to turn around a company facing asymmetric market attacks from a new, much larger indirect competitor and former partner. The no huddle offense shirt is a highly visible cultural artifact that allows his team and the rest of the company to focus on the concept of a dynamic, self-organizing marketing and sales organization that can deal with uncertainty as the norm.

My own view of the power of cultural artifacts, rituals and mythmaking as internal market ‘attractors’ came from my family, specifically my father. He did not graduate from an Ivy League b-school, or any university for that matter. Instead he chose to drop out of North Catholic High School in Philadelphia at the age of 17 to enlist in the Army Air Corps during World War II and fight Nazis in Jimmy Doolittle’s 8th Air Force. He served as a top turret gunner on a B17 bomber, the Chow Hound, which flew 30 combat missions over Germany, including the very first allied raid on Berlin itself. Through his simple storytelling and ‘mythmaking’ of those days, he imprinted on me a cultural heritage of what America is all about in times of quantum uncertainty like WW2.

The cultural artifacts displayed in our home, photos of the Chow Hound and it’s crew, the picture of a young, straight-backed GI saluting and staring fierce-eyed as the Distinguished Flying Cross was pinned to his chest, the plastic models of American war planes (and the enemy planes that were shot down), all became a part of the collective unconscious and ‘culture management system’ of our family. These artifacts were attractors catalyzing the ‘internal market’ within our family that pulled me, organically and over time, into his culture. And there were regular rituals as well. I remember being the only 10 year old on the block who could sing the Air Force Anthem, ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ on key, always remembering that the right ending (according to my father’s ritual) was ‘Nothing can stop the Army Air Corps’, the real name of the U.S Air Force for those who had absorbed it’s culture during WW2.

Like the values components I absorbed from my father, the 4 components of asymmetric marketing culture are not embedded overnight, or imposed on a marketing and sales organization with top-down management coercion or HR guideline. Asymmetric marketing culture can also be catalyzed by similar attractors, i.e. symbols, rituals, artifacts and social software-enabled processes that provide islands of cultural stability in the chaos of everyday marketing warfare. For this reason, asymmetric marketing organizations don’t need abstract cultural values statements---they need powerful, tangible artifacts, rituals, mythmaking and systems that create a marketing culture of execution.

What is an asymmetric marketing ‘culture management system’ (CMS)? In brief it is set of knowledge and social software-enabled processes that embed the process values components described above into your organization one day at a time in order to close the marketing and sales culture gap. Let me repeat again that a CMS is not a mechanism designed to embed higher order values abstractions like ‘innovation’, ‘competitiveness’ or ‘customer satisfaction’. It is designed to focus on least common denominator ‘process values’ that are the real core values that need to be embedded in an operating culture to create an asymmetry of execution will. For example, how can a marketing organization concern itself with ‘innovation’ if its process culture is not one of candid dialogue? It can’t, is the obvious answer. Hence the focus on core process values that constitute the ‘common sense’ immune system underlying higher values. At Asymmetri Incorporated we foster the adoption of culture management systems that include 4 basic modules as follows:

• Baseline Culture Assessment: Conducting and documenting a baseline sales and marketing culture assessment is the first step to systematically identifying the key cultural drivers of your sales and marketing teams and the ‘culture gap’ between strategy and execution in your organization. The assessment creates a cultural snapshot of the full spectrum of critical marketing activities including sales, product marketing, partner development, messaging, etc., focusing on the values that are driving behavior in the context of the new uncertainty. For example, ‘In our end-to-end marketing and sales organizations, what is preventing us from identifying a ‘qualified prospect’? Or, “why are leads falling through the cracks?” In a thorough assessment, it’s important not to sweep the past under the rug in the name of sales and marketing optimism but to look at every symptom of the gap. False optimism, a common character defect of sales and marketing professionals imbued with the ‘power of positive thinking’, is the enemy of asymmetric marketers. It’s also critical to look at the role of the ‘dominant’ dysfunctional industry culture, i.e. bubble-culture, in fostering what I call the 3Ds, i.e. dependence, denial and desperation in the perpetuation of non-sober marketing and sales activities. The cultural assessment, when completed and published on the CMS weblog for open discussion, also begins the process of embedding ‘one day at a time’ sober values and serves as an attractor for the marketing and sales teams you want to mobilize.
  

• Marketing Community Management: To close the marketing and sales culture gap, the whole ‘marketing community’ inside your company must be mobilized to participate in everyday candid ‘get real’ dialog and healthy creative conflict. But in many cases the marketing community is not a community at all, being locked up in functional stovepipes or ‘silos’ (sales, marketing, business development) where it is difficult to get real because of the political allegiances inside the silo, e.g. loyalty to a particular sales or marketing manager. SFA (sales force automation) and CRM systems need to be augmented with ‘marketing community platforms’, e.g. discussion boards, weblog self-publishing software, wiki document collaboration software (see SocialText.com for a discussion of wiki technology), etc. thereby creating a permanent community artifact where the best ideas and the best ‘reputations’ in the company can emerge and provide leadership. Marketing community enablement via social software technology can also help overcome the frequently negative cultural effects of email as a toxic weapon of corporate shunning and the building of divisive factions within the marketing and sales organization. I have seen more good ideas killed by email flaming than by any other means. As an antidote to negative or politically motivated email that reinforces departmental silos, digital marketing communities can serve as attractors for a get real culture of candor where creative conflict is the norm not the exception.
  

• Collaboration & ‘Internal Markets’ Management: To foster a self-organizing collaborative environment, you need to make ‘internal market management’ a ritual of the marketing, sales and customer service organizations. Internal market management may take the form of ‘dress rehearsals’ or ‘war games’, i.e. collaborative pre-launch or pre-campaign rituals that test-market your products and programs internally and get everybody on the same page, surfacing objections and vulnerabilities, and showcasing the really good ideas that may be locked up inside departmental silos. This is a critical way to prepare the whole sales and marketing team for external programs while unifying the culture. In the regular ritual of the pre-launch or pre-campaign process, people learn how to think, not just what to think, and come to feel that their fingerprints are on the offering or program being launched. This produces more sales and marketing team members who collectively and collaboratively own the revenue forecast of the company. In this environment, it becomes easier to self-organize to address the new uncertainty, or to introduce new ‘special ops’ marketing functions that bridge departmental silos. Once again, emerging social software technologies like real time conferencing or virtual meeting room software can augment your core SFA and CRM systems to become artifacts of the new internal market management and collaboration rituals.
  
  
• Ownership Management: Sales execution and market momentum rarely occur without tangible and intangible compensation and reward models that foster them. Within the context of a culture management system it’s critical to understand the process of momentum creation in your target category and disproportionately reward those roles in the organization responsible for creating that momentum. This may be different than reinforcing and rewarding only the traditional ownership roles within the discrete silos of your company. Momentum creation ownership metrics may differ from category to category, but once understood, can change the way you think about the sales and marketing process, e.g. what actually constitutes a ‘qualified’ prospect for your company’s products and services. Next generation EIM (enterprise incentive management) technologies and a sense of ‘higher mission’ can be employed as part of your CMS to build team-based dynamic incentive programs that reinforce shared ownership and the values of dialog and collaboration that give you an asymmetric cultural advantage.
  
  

In the sections that follow I will go into more detail on the 4 process values of an asymmetric marketing (MMBV) culture that can provide an important execution foundation for carrying out successful marketing and sales programs in the sandstorm economy. These core values can be more easily embedded in your culture by means of the culture management system concepts and technologies I will also describe.

• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Post Bubble
• Part Three: Getting Real
• Part Four: Self-Organizing
• Part Five: Ownership
  
  

About the Author: Joseph E. Bentzel is President of Asymmetri Incorporated, a marketing consultancy providing ‘asymmetric marketing’ services to high technology companies in the U.S and around the world.

Copyright 2003, Joseph E. Bentzel. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction with Author’s Permission.