Strategy

Are Three Spotted Badgers Worth One Purple Cow?

OK, so you know by now that we enjoy reading Seth Godin’s musings from time to time about permission and innovation.   Not that Seth has originated the idea of actually “doing what you say” — but he’s served notice on marketers to stop the interruption and starting courting your customers.

As we’ve sat with some clients in recent months discussing their 2009 plan, they invariably come back to the reality of their daily situation in that they work for C-level executives who frankly “don’t get it” (permission marketing) and are “unlikely to get it” anytime soon.   So these Marketing Directors and VP’s are faced with a dilemma in terms of what they should do and what they’ll likely be forced to do as it relates to their marketing strategy.

This dilemma sparked some thoughts within Polarity regarding the reality that the right academic answer is not always easy to implement when client cultures are geared toward interruption and marginal product innovation. This led us to ponder the concept of the spotted badger — innovation in a smaller package. We then mused whether three spotted badgers are worth one purple cow. The point being that the near-Utopian scenarios some authors paint of a wholesale shift in philosophy isn’t practical in many situations, as top executives need to be convinced over time of the need to change their approach. So, if revolutionary innovation (purple cows) are beyond your reach — maybe you can start innovating in a series of smaller steps over time.

We recently presented an integrated marketing strategy for a technology company in a commodity business.  The strategy included listing all of the scattered “tactics in search of a strategy” that the client was currently executing and overlaying the strategy the approach the client should be following.   After the meeting the client acknowledged we had hit the mark on the approach, but the CEO would never understand it — thus, funding it would be unlikely.

We suggested breaking the plan into smaller steps over a longer period to help get the client where they needed to go, while being sensitive to the fact that we’d need to make a believer of the CEO.   Is this risky?  Sure, the client could miss market opportunities by taking 24 months to do something that could have been done in 6 months — however, the alternative was to do nothing.

So if you’re a marketer wanting to revolutionize (delivering “purple cows”) but your internal audience isn’t buying in — don’t despair consider presenting a few spotted badgers instead.   They’re not as big as the cows — but they also don’t require the heavy lifting.

Tags: marketing strategy