growth

Grow through experiments

Harry_Waisman_lab Practice makes perfect. Who hasn’t been told that at some point in their life? But is it true?

I like Adam Grant’s take who believes that what separates the good from the great is the willingness to try new things. You may be successful the way you are, but regardless of whether you are a company or an individual if you follow the same thing, the same routine, the same strategy over and over again you are more or less standing still, it means you are not growing.

Especially today where our world is changing at an incredible speed we need to have the willingness to experiment. To experiment with what you already know, and to experiment beyond that.

As Adam Grant said in a recent interview with GQ:

“..I would love to see every individual, every group try at least one experiment every week. Whether that’s shifting the structure of your meetings, or rotating around the leader for that decision—you can make a long list of what kind of experiments might be relevant. But to me, that’s kind of the big lesson of organizational psychology: the people who are willing to try new things beat the ones who don’t.”

How can you break your silos of your own built routines and start to experiment?

(Photo Credit: Harry Waisman Lab)

The growth continues

Summer is in full swing and we have crossed the first half year mark. Time to look at some digital stats (kindly provided by We Are Social).

Facebook is still the dominating social media platform with almost 1.5 billion users. They are adding more users every day or impressively put ‘6 new users per second’. What is interesting is that what follows Facebook are messenger platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat or Messenger. This is particular interesting development in the mobile social world. People seem to prefer chats to the conventional social networks. Ads on WhatsApp soon?

What also fascinated me is that the statistics show that 225 million people around the world used the internet for the first time in the past 12 months. According to telecommunications giant Ericsson, cellular subscriptions will continue to grow to almost 8 billion active subscribers over the next 5 years. That’ll be more than the world population. And remember: not every world citizen is connected yet!

What does that mean? As I have written here in the past, as marketers we really need to place more effort on smart mobile devices. Not only are they part of our everyday life, for many people around the world is it their “first screen”, their only device. And they use it for everything from communicating, browsing the web, watching TV to shopping. This is the place where brands need to make an impression because it is becoming more than just a channel.

Speaking of marketing, mobile and social, I really like Talenti’s new ‘Flavorize Me’ campaign that uses social media profiles to create a personalized ice cream flavour. An algorithm analyzes the key words you have in your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram profiles, breaks those down into tastes and then into ingredients that match those. I ended up with “Marmalade Green Chili Biscuit”. Sounds very interesting. Talenti is only available in the US so unless they decide to take my personalized flavor and use it for actual production (which btw according to their website they will let me know by September 15), you will find me eating gelati in Italy this month.

It’s a bird, a plane…no it’s your marketing team!

Marketing can transform how a business leads. That should be somewhat of a mantra for us marketers. And not only for motivational purposes.
Marketing is a key driver to growth, market share, brand awareness and revenue.Therefore, it is even more important to put together a top class team that understands the value and purpose of marketing as well as has an appreciation of it. Because marketing is not a discipline “anyone” can do.

So does your marketing team understand your business? Do they have a vision of what they want to achieve? Do they know how to reach your customer and how best to communicate with them? Does your team have enough and varied experience to understand the different marketing channels? Are they adaptable, assertive and quick? Do they want to learn and grow? And finally, and most importantly, do they really understand the sales environment because marketing can only be truly successful if it works in unison with sales.

Your marketing team should be like Marvel Superheros – a group of talented, maybe sometimes flawed, persons coming together to “save the world”. For some super heroic inspiration you may want to read “Avengers Assemble: Putting Together a Superheroic Marketing Team” – which superhero are you in your team?