Whole Brain Marketing

All Mixed Up
The most com­mon model for defin­ing Mar­ket­ing is still the  mar­ket­ing mix.  This model is also known as the 4 P’s of Mar­ket­ing — refer­ring to its core ele­ments of Prod­uct, Price, Place and Pro­mo­tion.  The con­struct was devel­oped by Michi­gan State pro­fes­sor E. Jerome McCarthy, in 1960, and has since become a sta­ple of every Mar­ket­ing 101 course on the planet.  How­ever, the real­ity of Mar­ket­ing for the last 100 years is that there was a huge empha­sis placed on Pro­mo­tion, and the other three P’s were either an after­thought or the respon­si­bil­ity of another com­pany func­tion.  Some­where between Mar­ket­ing 101 and the Mar­ket­ing depart­ment, the mar­ket­ing mix got mixed up.   Right or wrong, to most peo­ple Mar­ket­ing meant Adver­tis­ing or some other form of Pro­mo­tion.  Mar­ket­ing peo­ple used Big bud­gets to make Big ads to run on the Big 3 net­works or in the Big pub­li­ca­tions and papers.  Get the One Big P right, and the rest would take care of itself.  Those days are long gone.  Now, things like social media, mobile tech­nol­ogy, ubiq­ui­tous broad­band inter­net access, and cheap data stor­age are Re-mixing the mar­ket­ing mix — chang­ing the role of Mar­ket­ing to one that goes far beyond advertising.

Brand New World
The web has turned us from a world of a few big hits into a world of infi­nite niches.  What used to be about big is now about close­ness.  Brands used to talk, now they must lis­ten.  It is a world where it is not just will you sell your prod­ucts in a store or on the web, but where out of the tril­lions of options on the web for will you sell your prod­ucts.  It is a world where some­one is prob­a­bly giv­ing away the very ser­vice you charge for free — as they try to make money with cross-subsidies, adver­tis­ing, or some other new pric­ing model.  It is a world where con­sumers expect offer imme­di­ate feed­back and expect instant sat­is­fac­tion.  One big P, ain’t what it used to be.  So what is a good Mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sional to do? Mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als can take advan­tage of these trends to become more valu­able and lever the good old mar­ket­ing mix in brand new ways.  It starts with the ones and zeros of data.

Social Media is Data
I love the bold ideals of the social web as much as any­one, if not more.  Yes the new inter­net is a dia­logue not a mono­logue.  Yes, the mod­ern con­sumer is empow­ered like never before.  Yes there are infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties for com­mu­ni­ca­tion, inno­va­tion, and progress. Yes, the social web changes every­thing.  Still, some­thing that we often for­get is that social media is dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion.  It is data.

Data, by itself is use­less. It is noisy.  It is over­whelm­ing.  How­ever data that is aggre­gated, fil­tered, placed in con­text, and ana­lyzed becomes knowl­edge.  Peo­ple, through their con­ver­sa­tions are gen­er­at­ing data like never before.  Your blog — data.  That silly sur­vey about 80’s music on Face­book — data.  The Thumbs Up you gave on that sta­tus update on Face­book — data.  The ReTweet of the link to Chris Bro­gan’s lat­est blog post — data.  The review of that book you bought on Ama­zon — data.  The things you search for, peo­ple you con­nect with, places you use your iphone to take pic­tures — all data.  Lever­aged prop­erly, this data can yield valu­able knowl­edge, serv­ing as the basis for holis­tic orga­ni­za­tional improve­ments.  This knowl­edge can be applied to any and all 4 of the Mar­ket­ing P’s to cre­ate some­thing new and excit­ing.  In this new world of dig­i­tal con­ver­sa­tion, the ques­tions of who, what, where, when, why, how,  how much, how often, and so on can be tracked, mea­sured, and ana­lyzed for insights.  But as a mar­keter, how do you put it together into some­thing meaningful?

Impor­tant Tan­gent: Whole Brain Think­ing
Devel­oped by Ned Her­rmann, Whole Brain think­ing com­bines the con­cept of right and left brain with that of upper and lower brain think­ing.  The result is a model that breaks human thought into 4 color coded quad­rants which are as follows:

Upper Left (Blue) — Crit­i­cal analy­sis, facts, tech­ni­cal accu­racy, data, brief and pre­cise infor­ma­tion
Lower Left (Green) — Details, Rules, Steps, Risk Man­age­ment, Con­trol, Tim­ing, Pol­icy
Lower Right (Red) — Emo­tions, Com­mu­nity, Cul­ture, Val­ues, Open Dis­cus­sion, Expres­sion
Upper Right (Yel­low) — Metaphors, Big Pic­ture, New Ideas, Inno­va­tion, Syn­the­sis, Vision, Future Trends

All peo­ple exhibit think­ing in all of the color quad­rants, but it is likely that an indi­vid­ual grav­i­tates towards one or two of them more strongly.  This ori­en­ta­tion is part of what makes you, you.  It can also change over time or in sit­u­a­tions of stress, where peo­ple often behave in ways that are seem­ingly dif­fer­ent than nor­mal.  My brain hap­pens to skew very heavy toward yel­low think­ing — and even more so in times of stress.

So why this tan­gent?  Well, if we know that this is how peo­ple think, than whole brain pro­vides a frame­work for clas­si­fy­ing the infor­ma­tion we have, want,  or need to col­lect.  This is how we as indi­vid­u­als com­mu­ni­cate and these quad­rants rep­re­sent our indi­vid­ual styles and our con­tex­tual tones.  Mea­sur­ing data in this con­text is par­tic­u­larly use­ful when applied to the mar­ket­ing mix.

Mar­keting — The Re-Mix

Pick your Mar­ket­ing P.  Explore the social web and dis­cover what con­ver­sa­tions per­tain to it?  Are they fac­tual or emo­tional? (Blue or Red)  Are peo­ple happy with your service?(Red) Are peo­ple con­fused by your pric­ing poli­cies? (blue)  Are peo­ple dis­cussing 10 ways to hack your process? (Green)  Are there per­ceived risks being expressed? (Green)  Are peo­ple com­par­ing the com­plex­ity of using your prod­uct with the ease of the com­pe­ti­tion in a step by step man­ner? (Green)  Are these con­ver­sa­tions increas­ing or decreas­ing? (Blue)  Are they chang­ing in tone? (Red)  Are they offer­ing ideas about your lat­est pro­mo­tion? (Yel­low)  Are they wish­ing your prod­uct were avail­able through an inno­v­a­tive new way? (Yellow)

Apply these ques­tions and oth­ers to your mar­ket­ing mix then lis­ten to con­ver­sa­tions, ask for infor­ma­tion, col­lect data, clas­sify it, mea­sure it, and look for new mean­ing and oppor­tu­nity.  Do the same for your com­pe­ti­tion, your indus­try, and poten­tially impor­tant trends.  Where are you strong?  Where are you weak?  Where are your oppor­tu­ni­ties for growth?

Think of the value that could come from sim­ply clas­si­fy­ing con­ver­sa­tions per­tain­ing to your com­pany, indus­try, or com­pe­ti­tion by both the color and the ele­ment of the mar­ket­ing mix.   What is the tone of the con­ver­sa­tion?  What is the mar­ket­ing vari­able being dis­cussed?  What needs are going unmet?  What con­ver­sa­tions are you involved in?  What con­ver­sa­tions should you be involved in? What could you do dif­fer­ently to cre­ate oppor­tu­nity? Are cer­tain cus­tomer groups or indi­vid­u­als express­ing feed­back about par­tic­u­lar parts of the mar­ket­ing mix?  What type of feed­back are they offer­ing?  Can you lever­age your strengths in new ways to meet new needs?  You could even go as far as to graph each P rel­a­tive to the % of color asso­ci­ated with it.  (Per­haps your price gen­er­ates a lot of red and blue dis­cus­sion, while prod­uct yields more yel­low and green)

With every ele­ment of the mar­ket­ing mix now being vital to suc­cess, using the Whole Brain model can help you bet­ter under­stand what peo­ple want, why they want it, and what you need to do to help them.   The chal­lenge is now less about a sup­ply of data.  Data is more and more abun­dant every day.  No the real chal­lenge is con­vert­ing data into mean­ing­ful infor­ma­tion about the future of your mar­ket­ing mix.  Done prop­erly, using Whole Brain think­ing can color your think­ing in excit­ing new ways and paint a more vibrant future for your business.