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5 Principles of Convergence: How To Work Better At The Intersection Of Tech, Creativity, And Media

Convergence is both buzzword and marketing reality. Razorfish CEO Bob Lord outlines 5 ways creative companies can adapt to a converging world and create better brand experiences. 

The word convergence has been picking up steam in the marketing world. It may even be the “big data” term of 2013. Yet, the word means different things to different people. At Razorfish, we use convergence to describe the coming together of three irresistible forces--media, technology, and creativity--to create experiences that enrich the consumer’s relationship with the brand.

Convergence is a constant process, not an end point. Technology, creativity, and media are constantly evolving, and so is the converged company. It is a never-ending challenge to adapt a customer experience that, in our digital age, will always be in flux. Too often, businesses are far behind consumers in embracing technological change, a problem that has everything to do with how the organization is set up. My new book, coauthored with Razorfish Global CTO Ray Velez, Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology, describes in detail how enterprises and teams must adapt for an age of disruption.

Here are five key principles: 

Put the Customer at the Center.

Being ready for convergence isn’t about building an innovations lab, spending marketing budget on Facebook and Twitter ads or about hiring a social media “guru” to respond to online complaints. It’s about embracing a customer-centric mind-set and making your entire organization responsive to the customer journey. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially for larger, well-established companies where scale has mandated the creation of a complicated organizational chart.

Strategies need to be based on data from actual consumer activity, not abstract gut feeling. That data should dictate not only what experiences you serve consumers but where, when, and how. Brand communications must engage the consumer in social platforms and ecosystems and open APIs. And the retail experience must be made omni-channel, giving shoppers the same experience whether they’re in-store, online, or on the phone. 

Think of Your Brand as a Service and Experience.
You’re no longer in the business of selling stuff; you’re filling consumers’ needs. As a marketer, you’re creating new products and apps and always-on ecosystems, not just a series of campaigns based around a calendar of product launches. Nike is the classic example, with its ecosystem of fitness apparel, gadgets like FuelBand and services like Nike+ that immerse the user in the company’s innovation and create an end-to-end fitness solution. Special K, one of our clients, is still in the cereal game and it sells a ton of it. But it’s also in the health, fitness, and weight-loss games. It took its Special K challenge and turned it into a digital weight-loss platform.

To create and maintain this ecosystem, you’ll be investing in marketing operations, not just working media, and bringing in more designers and developers. In the past, marketing ops were largely limited to the maintenance of an internal marketing team and hiring and firing agencies that produced the creative work. People were accountable for spending the dollars, not how effectively they were spent. In a converged world, it will be about those activities, and also about investing in people and systems to ensure that the marketing spending is optimized. 

Reject Silos.
Media, technology, and creativity are no longer discrete problems. Let’s take the most fundamental example of this: the creation of an ad. A few years back, a new ad campaign was simply a creative challenge that was solved by coming up with a new flight of TV spots. These days, a new ad will likely involve some technological and media challenges. Are you tapping into the API of a hot new social media platform? How are you getting your brilliant campaign in front of a demographic that’s no longer watching TV?

The traditional, silo-based organization is ill-equipped to answer these questions. So what you need to achieve is better collaboration between marketing and IT. To get there, your C-suite might have senior roles like chief digital officer and chief marketing technologists, filled by experts in both functions catalyzing innovation throughout the organization and fostering collaboration. Or you might try bottom-up solutions like internal account management. In this structure, marketing folks have counterparts in IT and vice versa. 

Act Like a Startup.
There’s a set of common misconceptions about how established enterprises should learn from startups. It’s not about moving into flashy new digs or setting up Ping-Pong tables or having free sushi for lunch.

Like customer-centricity, the startup mentality requires much deeper and more meaningful change. It requires uprooting many old assumptions and habits, especially those around tech infrastructure, and doing things the way a newer, leaner company might.

Acting like a startup in this sense means the following:

--Your enterprise deploys--or at least experiments with--cheap, fast, and flexible tools like cloud computing, social media platforms, and open APIs.

--You employ product managers who are accountable for particular aspects of the consumer experience, just like Facebook has tasked someone with oversight of the newsfeed. As one of our clients describes it, product managers have to understand the customer and constantly prioritize and re-prioritize what’s best for the customer.

--You employ Agile methodology and rapid prototyping.
And look, no Ping-Pong.

Embrace Diversity
Every organization needs specialists and experts, but in the place of environments where everyone fills one role and thinks about nothing besides that role, there needs to be cross-fertilization, a coming together of various fields, disciplines, personalities, and cultures.

In practice, it’s important to get a wide variety of expertise and perspectives around the table—marketing and technology, of course, but also HR, legal, and finance. We call this building a big boat, and it’s vital to building a convergence-ready organization.

But there’s more to it than just getting all the right people around the table. You also have to incentivize collaboration, getting multiple functions to rally around a shared set of objectives and a shared method of measuring process--that’s a big change and it has to be tracked cleanly and carefully. This entails getting your systems to feed a dashboard that tracks a manageable set of metrics. Then you have to get the team to check in regularly, or at least pay attention to the readouts they’re receiving.

Adapting your organization for convergence is never over. It’s a constant cycle of testing, learning, building, and destroying. All the more reason you should start now. The winners of this era will be the companies whose main focus is constantly improving on the customer journey. If you follow your customer, you can’t go wrong.

By:  Bob Lord, Global CEO of Razorfish.

How To Create A Disney-Like Addiction To Your Company

Step one: Make eye contact and smile. That and six other seemingly simple steps can help make customer-service magic.

By: Dayna Steele 

I have always said I would never be that person with a Disney stuffed animal sticking out of my bag on a flight home from Orlando. Never. No way. I am much too cool for that. 

After a recent speaking engagement at Disney and four days in the Florida parks with the Disney staff and their fans, I now understand the Disney obsession so many people around the world have. That addiction is fueled by Disney’s customer service and their employee “cast member” attitude:

1.It is good, clean fun. That sounds sort of old fashioned these days but it was nice. Disney employees are well groomed, with clean uniforms, and great attitudes. You do not overhear any employees complaining and you definitely do not hear any employees using foul language. Come to think of it, I do not think I heard any guests using expletives, either

2. Disney parks and facilities are clean. Really clean. You could serve a meal in their bathrooms and never think twice about it.

3.Every Disney employee looks you in the eye and smiles. Every employee I passed in the hotel and in the parks--from managers to ride operators to cleaning staff and more. Every. Single. One.

4.Disney has embraced a healthy initiative making it easy to find fruit and other healthy foods in the parks. At one point, it was easier to find an orange and an apple than it was to find a hamburger and fries.

5.Disney employees always try to say “yes.” I watched a Disney employee turn people away from a reserved VIP parade seating area for an hour without ever uttering the word “no” – instead saying, with a smile, “This area is reserved” and then pointing out a place where the guests could find good seating.

6.The unexpected is expected of Disney employees and that makes for great interaction with the customers as well. I watched a child go from happy with popcorn to sad when it spilled back to happy again when two Disney employees swooped in – one to clean up the spilled popcorn and the other offering to get the child a refill. All within a matter of two minutes.

7.Disney has designated smoking areas but I do not think I was ever near one. Not once did I smell second hand smoke in four days. That was pleasant.

After a little research, I discovered my seven observations were not that far off from the way Disney employees are trained. Here are the Seven Disney Services Guidelines:

1.Make eye contact and smile

2.Greet and welcome every guest

3.Seek out guest contact

4.Provide immediate service recovery

5.Always display appropriate body language

6.Create dreams and preserve the “magical guest experience”

7.Thanks each and every guest

These seven service guidelines should be the first thing in company employee manuals the world over. Once you master these seven simple steps in everything you do… the rest is pure magic.

And yes, I did return home with a stuffed Mickey Mouse sticking out of my bag. Walt Disney is now on my Rock Star company list.