By Bob Garfield
The days of Madison Avenue dictating messages to you are all but at an end. Goodbye, Mr. Whipple. Fondle all the Charmin you want, but do it on your own time.
Mind you, I’m not talking about the death of marketing and media. I’m talking about a dramatic rebirth in marketing and media, in approximately the way the end of the last Ice Age yielded exponentially more species, and more advanced species, than had ever prospered on earth. When the TV Age finally succumbs to the Digital Age, we will be living a different world. And (mainly) a much better one.
The digital revolution is already having far-ranging effects on every aspect of our lives, from socialization to communication to information to entertainment to democracy, and these Brave New World effects will only be magnified as the Cowardly Old World collapses before our eyes. Not that this will happen. This is happening. Right now.
So, here’s a thought: why not spend the better part of four years documenting the destruction of the old mass-media/mass-marketing business model, while simultaneously envisioning the micro-media/micro-marketing world that will succeed it? Splendid idea. Two! Two! Two books in one!
“The Chaos Scenario” is about the historic re-ordering of media, marketing and commerce triggered by the revolution in digital technology. It will explore five continents for examples of adaptation to what is literally a new age of human endeavor. It is about the cutting edge, which is sometimes a laser scalpel but, of course, also sometimes a guillotine. It is, in short, about crawling from the wreckage of the old order to establish a new one. So let us therefore begin in that notable crucible of apocalyptic disruption — Billund, Denmark — at a company that makes plastic toy bricks.
From the airport it is but a mile to Hotel Legoland, which itself will remind nobody of, say, the Taj Palace Dubai. It’s more like a sprawling, Lego-themed Best Western, at the driveway to which visitors are greeted by a gigantic animatronic bellman made of Lego bricks, grinning and saluting, grinning and saluting, like a fascist Big Boy.
In the hotel, corridors with such fanciful names as Fairytale Road and City Avenue are lined with other colorful LEGO constructions. The hallway to my room was guarded by a 4-foot-tall gnome wielding a sign that announced, a bit hyperbolically, “Castle Street.” If you were little Dorothy, you would turn to your dog and say, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
But you would be wrong. Billund is very much like Kansas, only with herring for breakfast.
So, yes, Billund is the birthplace each year of millions upon millions of old fashioned, low-tech building blocks molded in a cow pasture. It is also where I began my journey as a chronicler of revolution. For here the future of commerce is being forged.
First for its line of robotic toys called Mindstorms, and now expanding to its Lego Creator and Lego Factory lines, this company has pioneered the notion of consumer involvement — not only soliciting ideas from its most loyal and enthusiastic customers, but actively recruiting them for product design.
Mindstorms, which first appeared in 1998, was itself a forward-looking enterprise for a company that began in 1932 selling wooden pull toys, transitioned to colorful plastic bricks in 1949 and basically stood pat for 50 years. But the original Mindstorms technology was complicated and sales slow. That is, until 2002, when the Mindstorms User Group got to work on the product’s second generation.
For 14 months, between Billund and their own home computers, these volunteers reinvented the brand — which now is a soaring success. And not only did they fly to Jutland at their own expense for the privilege of being unpaid consultants, they turned right around and evangelized the resulting products to the greater community of fans, geeks and Lego freaks. Internet fan sites, in no way contributed to or controlled by the company, represent virtually the entire Mindstorms marketing program.
The Mindstorms experiment took place in the midst of a crisis at LEGO. After the millennium, as electronic toys and Internet games increasingly usurped their customers’ attention, sales flattened and profitability disappeared. In 2004, losses were so steep, the company was in danger of liquidation. That crisis, perhaps combined with revelations about the passion and commitment of the core audience emerging from the Mindstorms project, led management to rethink every aspect of its business, from dumping extraneous product lines to trimming the workforce to institutionalizing the consumer participation concept.
Under the new management structure, “community education & direct” is one of only four lines of authority within the company — co-equal with administration, supply-chain management and sales & marketing. Its function: to deal directly with consumers, whose collective wisdom, enthusiasm and judgment — as demonstrated in forum after forum online — exceeds that of the company itself.
“What this enlightened organization is doing, in other words, is listening.”What this enlightened organization is doing, in other words, is listening. To loyal consumers, to dissatisfied consumers, to employees, to suppliers, to any faint echo in the marketplace that may help it sell plastic bricks to the world.
This exercise doesn’t necessarily have to take place by flying people to headquarters. It can go on every second of the day, on an organization’s own Web sites and on the Web sites of others. And it will create connections, data and insights such as you never enjoyed before, or perhaps even imagined before. Because it turns out that all those guys with the PowerPoint presentations you’ve been sitting through for the past three years — you know, the ones insisting that “the consumer is in control” — are absolutely right.
“The consumer is in control: of what and when she watches, of what and when she reads, of whether to pay any attention to you whatsoever or to make your life a living hell.”The consumer (and voter and citizen) is in control: of what and when she watches, of what and when she reads, of whether to pay any attention to you whatsoever or to make your life a living hell. This might be an excellent time, therefore, to listen to what she has to say. And it sure wouldn’t hurt to make her your friend.
This is the future of everything. In fact, if you wish to survive for long in media, marketing, politics or any other institution accustomed to managing its affairs from the top down, it is the right now of everything. Survival means institutionalizing dialogue with all of your potential constituencies and sometimes total strangers for the purpose of market research, product development, customer relationships, corporate image and transactions themselves. The last of those benefits is especially important, because when you sell goods or services, you get money.
That is the essence of “Listenomics,” my term for the art and science of cultivating relationships with individuals in a connected, increasingly open-source environment. It is also what this book probably should be titled. Unfortunately, I was pre-empted by “Wikinomics” and freakin’ “Freakonomics,” two fine books that went all -omic on the publishing world before I got a chance to. So while it may not be such a unique coinage, it is a fitting discipline for the most extraordinary world in which it will flourish — a world very unlike anything we’ve experienced before.
This selection is excerpted with permission from the introduction of “The Chaos Scenario” by Bob Garfield.
