Images: Courtesy of artbyphil

By now, it’s gone. A temporary city that forms during the annual Burning Man event is fading back into the nothingness of a remote desert. Most inhabitants are back in their normal life, and within weeks, the entire city will have disappeared. It’s an interesting way for a city to exist – once a year, just for a few weeks. People will talk about their experiences for months (just follow the hashtag #burningman to get a sense of the enthusiasm) and start making plans for next year’s event.

This was my second time at Burning Man. It remains one of the most bizarre, creative, inspiring, breathtaking and weird events I ever attended. Whatever you heard about Burning Man: It’s true. And, it’s completely false. You have to experience it to really understand it. It’s like having a kid, running a marathon or writing a book: Everything you heard about it is true. And, completely false at the same time.

On my way back from Black Rock City, I reflected on the lessons marketers can learn from Burning Man:

1. The paralyzing fear of change is far more inhibiting than the actual experience of change:

I’ve been a runner for more than 15 years. The first 5 years, I never ran more than 6 miles per day. A marathon was completely out of my reach, even though I was intrigued by the idea. “How do they run 26 miles?”, I asked myself many times, envisioning images of pain and agony. I tried to run 10 miles, never able to do it. Started walking after 6-7 miles, my usual comfort zone. Until one day, I decided to run 15 miles that day. No particular reason, just the feeling that I was sick of not being able to break that 7-mile barrier. And, I didn’t want to just break it. I wanted to shatter it. And so I did. Just to finish a marathon 3 months later.

Many marketers feel the same way: They want to break with the old model of marketing but they feel stuck in their old ways, the outdated processes and the aging model of broadcast marketing. They wait for someone to have the courage to change. The truth is: Nobody gets courage and then changes everything. First you change everything and then get the courage.

2. Don’t give up too early

The first time you try anything new, your senses are under attack. You don’t even know if it’s good or bad. You just know it’s new. You don’t know yet how to put it into perspective and add it to your experiences. The first time is the basic foundation of the overall process. The best advice for the first time in everything: Hang in there. Do whatever you can, the best you can. The second time is different: You have now one experience to compare your second experience to. And your second experience might be good or bad. Better or worse. It helps you to avoid bad experiences and to top good experiences. The third time is where it gets interesting. That’s when you become part of the context, when you can apply some of your experience history to the current experience. The third time gives you enough time to analyze incoming data.

This is true for visiting new cities. New countries. Starting a new job. And it’s true for marketing.

The first two digital campaigns/social media initiatives won’t be featured in any award book. I worked hard, I tried my best, I just didn’t have the proper context to deliver the best work possible. With the third campaign/initiative, I felt more grounded, more experienced. When you experiment with new platforms, new ideas or a new brand that just decided to run their marketing with you, just know you’re not going to ace it with the first idea/initiative. The fear of failure is looming large but you need to beat it by accepting this normal process.

3.) Give people a sense of ownership

The creativity and passion people pour into Burning Man has nothing to do with monetary rewards. It has a lot to do with a sense of ownership of the event. Sure, the man will burn, there will be coffee and ice, basic structures. The rest of the event is up to each one of the attendees.

Advanced managers base their ethics on fairness, harmony and gratitude to inspire a sense of achievement to goes beyond profit. Modern employees expect more from companies than just a paycheck. The work place should provide an avenue for employees to build knowledge, skills and experience.

The same is true for marketing: It’s not enough to have an offer or a discount coupon anymore. Customers review and recommend brands with a sense of ownership never seen before. Brands need to identify the best way to engage these passionate stakeholders. The future doesn’t belong to broadcast. The future belongs to companies that share values with their customers, that build platforms where all stakeholders can co-create and collaborate, and give people a sense of ownership.

4. Passion has real value

You can feel real passion. Just watch an artist or a kid immersed in something they are passionate about. Objects are not important at Burning Man. We are in the age of transition: From the economy of objects to the economy of people. Just look around: Everyone is starving for meaning. We’re meaning-making machines. All of us experienced how quickly the focus on profits can turn into an economic disaster. Instead, people want to do meaningful stuff that matters.

The new marketing reality implies that brands need to take a hard look at themselves and decide what they stand for. What is the inner truth of your company? What is your purpose? The foundation of any successful company in the future is purpose, passion and integrity, coupled with empathy and care for all stakeholders. It goes way beyond any CSR initiatives or charitable donations. The new marketing reality requires companies with big hearts.

5. The world needs more kindness

Tim Ferriss (The 4-hour workweek) discovered kindness in a sand storm. And, he shared a poem by Naomi Shinab Nye, entitled “Kindness”:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

When your dreams turn to dust, vacuum.

My first impression: It’s still early in the game. Very early. We’re still wrapping our head around the whole concept of VRM. Since the idea was to bring together visionaries/practitioners of VRM and CRM, the discussion often reverted back to CRM and how to monetize the customer/data. Clearly, all of us have problems transitioning from the old marketing/advertising paradigm into a new world where advertising is pure demand creation, driven by the attention economy, and relationships between brands and people fall under the VRM umbrella, purely intention driven.

CRM was designed to control customers even better. VRM is an added layer to provide customers with controls. To create an ecosystem that delivers value to all parties. Value doesn’t necessarily mean monetary value. To build all these systems to get $1 off on a deal doesn’t seem worth all the effort. The value is in creating real relationships between people and brands. By collaborating and co-creating value with customers. The future of business is in creating something more valuable and meaningful than just pure shareholder value.

As Umair Haque says in his “Smart Growth Manifesto”,

“21st century economies will be powered by smart growth. Not all growth is created equal. Some kinds of growth are more valuable than others. Where dumb growth is unsustainable, unfair, and brittle, smart growth is sustainable, equitable, and resilient.

Here are the four pillars of smart growth – for economies, communities, and corporations:

1. Outcomes, not income. Dumb growth is about incomes – are we richer today than we were yesterday? Smart growth is about people, and how much better or worse off they are – not merely how much junk an economy can churn out. Smart growth measures people’s outcomes – not just their incomes. Are people healthier, fitter, smarter, happier? Economics that measure financial numbers, we’ve learned the hard way, often fail to be meaningful, except to the quants among us. It is tangible human outcomes that are the arbiters of authentic value creation.

2. Connections, not transactions. Dumb growth looks at what’s flowing through the pipes of the global economy: the volume of trade. Smart growth looks at how pipes are formed, and why some pipes matter more than others: the quality of connections. It doesn’t just look at transactions at the global, regional, or national level — how much world trade has grown, for example — but looks at how local and global relationships power invention and innovation. Without Silicon Valley’s relationships powering the development of personal computing and the internet, for example, the volume of trade between Taiwan, Japan, and China, would be a fraction of what it is. Smart growth seeks to amplify connection and community — because the goal isn’t just to trade, but to co-create and collaborate.

3. People, not product. The next time you hear an old dude talking about “product”, let him know the 20th century ended a decade ago. Smart growth isn’t driven by pushing product, but by the skill, dedication, and creativity of people. What’s the difference? Everything. Globalization driven by McJobs deskilling the world, versus globalization driven by entrepreneurship, venture economies, and radical innovation. People not product means a renewed focus on labour mobility, human capital investment, labour market standards, and labour market efficiency. Smart growth isn’t powered by capital dully seeking the lowest-cost labour — but by giving labour the power to seek the capital with they can create, invent, and innovate the most.

4. Creativity, not productivity. Uh-oh: Creativity is an economic four-letter word. Why? Because it’s hard to measure, manage, and model. So economists focus on productivity instead — and the result is dumb growth. Smart growth focuses on economic creativity – because creativity is what let us know that competition is creating new value, instead of just shifting old value around. What is economic creativity? How many new industries, markets, categories, and segments an economy can consistently create. Think China’s gonna save the world? Think again: it’s economically productive, but it’s far from economically creative. Smart growth is creative — not merely productive.”

While many VRM initiatives will be driven by innovative divisions within enterprises, the real change agent will be customers. They will be the enzyme in the evolution of VRM. We have to help them understand that tools will be soon available that give them equal footing with brands, that give them power to engage with brands on their terms. That’s a powerful message. Especially in this new normal economy, people want to extract more value out of brands than just a coupon or a silly loyalty program.

And, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If done right, VRM tools will revolutionize all aspects of our lives: health care, government, education – you name it.

From what I gathered from the workshop so far:

• We’re close to achieve data portability
• While Doc Searls believes VRM code should be open source, I heard some dissenters
• The value proposition for people is still too vague to excite people outside of our bubble
• We’re too focused on transactions. Instead, we should focus on value exchanges
• We still have to identify the change agents within organizations. Marketing? Customer Service? (Gulp) IT?
• How can fourth parties create stakeholder value?
• How can VRM complement legacy VRM systems?

I don’t think anybody was expecting comprehensive answers for all these questions in a workshop. On the contrary, I hope for more questions to arise on Day 2. My goal for this workshop was not to get all the answers. My goal was not to stop questioning.

Below a few Twitter highlights from Day 1:

@jyarmis: 1995: the invention of the cookie. the end.

@missrogue When we solve problems for individuals, we actually end up solving problems for businesses in the process.

@mjayliebs Search is really the entire set of activities i perform, including talking to friends, neighbors, trusted sources,oh, and google

@nitinbadjatia User driven search (VRM search) – control over input, control over output and control over who gets to help you

@glfceo enterprises trying to predict customers intents will fail

@joeandrieu John McKean: the real challenge is the behavioral one: will individuals move from a CRM-directed world to a self-directed one?

@joshuakahn yeah, a lot of the stuff I’m hearing here is early, but actually alot farther along than I thought.

@missrogue With VRM, I have the opportunity to say, “You earn my trust and I’ll give you the key to all of my information.”

@kevinmarks Josh Weinberger: who are the best communicators in your org? your support people. Why get them off the phone to customers?

@mkrisgman Business is based on exchange of value, power, expectation, and degrees of valuation.

@mjayliebs VRM and CRM are whole lot closer to each other than people think – the gap is culture and understanding as much as principle

@DeanLand For VRM enterprise level uptake: leverage data, show benefits (aka: enable the information) create a VRM ecosystem.

@nhbaldwin vrm offers the vendor a b2b relationship, tighter personalization, with the consumer

@candres this is the confluence of intention and solicitation.

@joshuakahn cookies; designed to be low level machine ID’s, not useful for human ID’s, no matter how you bake ‘em. <- Craig Burton

@jyarmis privacy is only as good as the number of people you can be confused for

Looking forward to Day 2

I proposed a keynote entitled “Let’s kill advertising and start over.” The keynote will explore the journey beginning with CRM to Social CRM to my hope for the future: VRM.

In brief, VRM gives people the power to interact with brands on their terms. People will regain ownership of their personal data and decide themselves who they want to share this information with. This has many advantages for all stakeholders:

• It gives companies a much better understanding of the market, reducing the waste of the current guessing game we call advertising
• Data is not housed in silos, allows for more opportunities to interconnect systems
• VRM is based on opt-in, improving trust between brands and people. Increasing likelihood they will be open to your message
• It opens the market up for real competition
• VRM is the perfect companion for the evolving prosumer.

Here are a few more thoughts about VRM: Let’s leapfrog from Social CRM to VRM and Edison, Insull and planning for the future of VRM.

VRM is a logical evolution of the inefficient seller-buyer relationship we’re experiencing each and every day.

Does a world ruled by VRM need advertising?

Yes. But we need a big reset.

The advertising industry is in an arms race with people right now. Gather as many data points as possible, hoping for more relevancy, and then let’s hunt down the target. Banner Blindness? Let’s add bigger ads to the mix. Declining Engagement Rate? Hide the close button, design the ad and page in a way that people have to engage. Declining metrics always lead to more disruption. To new ways to segment people. To annoy them more. That mindset has to go. And I don’t know many people who would cry if the disruption race would finally take its last lap.

That doesn’t mean advertising will disappear. VRM will help advertising to have a very profitable renaissance.

I love good advertising. And I can’t stand bad advertising. I’m pretty sure most people feel that way.

• Good advertising gives me valuable input for my decision-making process. I would like to find out about new products through an entertaining commercial
• And, if that commercial pays for a good network show, even better
• Some ads (just look at fashion magazines) provide an emotional and cultural undertone, and change the way I feel about myself, the world and the product. Sure, it’s superficial. But true. Can you imagine seeing an Old Navy ad in Vogue? What would that do to your connection with the magazine?

To create demand for a product/service, we need good advertising. (And better marketing) But not top-down advertising driven by data silos. We need to develop new ways to advertise to people, incorporating co-creation and collaboration. By regarding people as partners and not targets. By showing respect to people (opt-in) and not as victims (opt-out).

The combination of VRM and an advertising reset is just plain exciting and offers benefits to everybody. More people need to join the conversation and discuss the implications of VRM for all stakeholders. And, that’s why I want to speak about VRM at SXSWi.

Interested? Please vote for the keynote here

Image: Courtesy of 19.media

It can be quite a challenge to have an office in downtown Los Angeles. You walk by the shoeshine man that sells illegal cigarettes on the side, the older woman with bible verses plastered on her clothes, the yeller, the screamer, the starer, the follower. Some people scare me. Some people amuse me. Some people make my heart bleed.

Before I started this venture, I lived the typical pod experience: From the work pod to the home pod to the entertainment pod. The journeys in-between (mostly spent on freeways) were pure annoyances, life wasted.

We tend to get insights from people when they’re in their pod. In the old days, we moved them from the work pod to the market research pod. Nowadays, we add to the mix a lot of social insights, gathered from people who are either in their work, home or entertainment pod. This is valuable and has its place.

But, to really understand people, we need to leave our pods. Because the real interesting stuff happens outside of pods. Outside of places where we have to play a role (and, yes, we all do play a role when we use social platforms) and be not exactly who we are. Or meant to be. These interesting things will give us insights to help make people’s lives better. It will help us doing things, providing services and creating products that are of real value to people.

“Hidden Heroes: The Genius of Everyday Things” is an exhibition in Weil am Rhein, Germany, that displays objects like a corkscrew, paper clip, clothespin, egg carton and 30 other useful and familiar objects. Very simple inventions that barely changed over time. Because there was no need to improve them.

“The German pharmacist Maximilian Negwer hit upon his 1907 idea of cushioning wax ear plugs with cotton wool when reading Homer’s “The Odyssey.” Untangling burrs from his dog’s fur after an Alpine hunting trip prompted the Swiss engineer George de Mestral to develop Velcro fabric fastener in the 1940s and 1950s.

Air bubble film, or bubble wrap, was conceived in the 1950s after a Swiss inventor, Marc Chavannes, noticed how the clouds seemed to cushion an airplane as it descended, and realized that a similar effect could be achieved in packaging by sealing air inside plastic film. An American scientist, Art Fry, dreamed up the Post-it note in the late 1970s when singing in a church choir. He couldn’t find the right page in his hymn book because the paper bookmark kept slipping out.”

The common theme of all these stories is that none of these inventions were made inside an office. People had insights or flashes of inspiration when they were living their everyday life. If we really believe that the future of marketing is in delivering value, being of service and helpful, then we need to leave our pods more often.

Otherwise, you’ll never see the shoeshine man that sells illegal cigarettes on the side, the older woman with bible verses plastered on her clothes, the yeller, the screamer, the starer, the follower. You can’t find that in a PowerPoint or spreadsheet.