The Strategist‘s Guide to What‘s Hot and What‘s Not.

One in eight couples who married in the last year met online. If MySpace were a country, it would rank in the top twenty largest, according to population size. More unique bits of information will be published this year than in the previous 5,000 years combined. The world is changing, folks. And it’s becoming increasingly difficult for advertising pros to stay on top of it all. To help keep you from losing that sharp edge of yours, we’ve put together a quick guide to what matters and what doesn’t in our business. Pay attention, but keep in mind this guide is subject to change at a moment’s notice!

Hot: Consumer-Defined Brand Definitions
Not: Old or Assumed Brand Definitions
Familiarity is often comforting, except when it comes to defining today’s brands. In our super-connected, consumer-empowered society, brands are being reinvented and redefined outside of the hallowed halls of previously established brands. So, resist the urge to live by the old brand assumptions floating around your organization and question everything about how it is being defined.

If you don’t regularly observe or listen to your customers, allocate a portion of your budget and time to tapping into what they think of you, and what they are saying about your brand. Beyond traditional research techniques, there are other ways today to hear what is being said. In the last few years, a number of online research firms have popped up that monitor what is being written about your brand, and can assist with tracking cyber chatter about your products and services.

Hot: Brand Energy
Not: Brand Consistency
As we just noted, you should resist any temptation to ignore what consumers are saying about your brand, because it is quite feasible that your brand’s definition is changing in the eyes of your customers. Instead of trying to keep your brand image consistent by focusing on strict adherence to your brand standards, channel your energies into analyzing the chemical makeup of your brand’s “energy” – a dynamic that thrives on constant innovation and redefinition. Successful brands today are kinetic, not static, and easily adapt to our changing environment without compromising their essence.

Hot: Newness & Complexity
Not: Sameness & Order
News flash to all you left-brainers out there: linear thinking is out.

Sir Kenneth Robinson, an expert in creativity (so much so that Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for it in 2003) points out that so many of our creative-centric work environments – both agencies and client-side – are still structured on a linear-based industrial model. For example, the account manager or planner drafts the creative brief in isolation, sends it off to the creative department, at which point copy and layout are developed in rough form and later refined in production. Finally, the finished creative product arrives at the end of the assembly line, where it is transported off to its intended destination.

Sir Kenneth says that instead of structuring the creative process around such a linear and rigid arrangement, we should be working in an environment inspired by an agrarian model, which optimizes fluid creative thinking. A farmer never knows what his day will bring, what problems he’ll have to solve, yet he must continually apply resourcefulness and creativity to achieve what he or she needs to accomplish each day.

The most successful agencies and marketing departments today foster a highly collaborative team environment across all functions, in which each person has a functional specialty but contributes on a broader level. In other words, media planners help determine creative concepts and execution ideas, and the creatives are encouraged to suggest new ways to connect with the target audience.

Hot: Corporate Actions
Not: Corporate Communications
A calculated and controlled corporate communications strategy no longer matters as much as it once did. The ever-growing sophistication of consumers, empowered by easy access to information, often results in a dismissal of corporate communications as “corporate speak.”

What matters today is a company’s actions and demonstrated point of view, over the company’s words. Dove, IKEA, and Target each have created successful brand reputations and have clearly communicated the ideals that their respective brands represent through their corporate actions.

Hot: Small Things
Not: Big Things
If you limit your attention to just the big things in your organization, you might find yourself unpleasantly surprised by events that start off as little, but mushroom into something much bigger.

Kryptonite learned this the hard way, when a cyclist posted a message on a bicycling online forum, stating that he could open his Kryptonite lock with a ball point pen instead of the key. This innocent enough posting was linked to by other blogs monitored by the mass media, which immediately reported on it. Within five days of the posting, Kryptonite found itself in the middle of a public relations nightmare, and had to hastily organize a lock exchange program.

If Kryptonite had been on top of monitoring online mentions of its brand, the company could have addressed the issue immediately, resulting in a more proactive stance and less media attention.

Hot: Try, Learn, Try Again
Not: Learn Once, Stick To It
Former Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, predicted that the top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004.

Our changing and evolving world demands that we become perpetual students, and that means building in opportunities to experiment with new messaging and media as an ongoing activity in our marketing plans. This approach requires senior management (and especially the CFO) to embrace the concept of experimentation and provide the necessary resources and supportive environment to allow marketers and their agencies the freedom to try new things without fear of failure.

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