5 Ways to Combat Design Fixation

Marketers who default to an old fix for a new problem are guilty of "design fixation."

It's one reason so much marketing looks copy-cat.

Design fixation—also known as the Einstellung Effect—refers to our tendency to rely blindly on old solutions, and insist our first idea is always the best.

Fortunately, novices are more susceptible to design fixation than old hands, studies show.

How can you free yourself?

Jami Oetting, writing for Hubspot, suggests five antidotes:

• Immerse yourself in new subjects. Escape your marketing bubble and reach for far-afield ideas. Learn a little about voles, snow-sports, fire protection, Washington Irving, and Czarist Russia.

• Work with others. Diversity in experiences, expertise and cultural background and can stimulate fresh thinking.

• Review previous solutions. Peer reviews will expose biases and flaws faster than anything. They force you to look at your ideas with iron-cold eyes.

• Analyze and brainstorm. Generating more ideas helps assure an innovative one will emerge.

• Test. Gather feedback from focus groups and A/B experiments.

Emissary of Humankind

Comparative Communist Political Systems was one of the more desultory courses I took in college.

The reading list was brutal, and I had to trudge many a dawn to the Library of Congress, because a lot of the stuff comprised unpublished papers by NATO diplomats.

But had I not elected the course, I might never have met the professor, Jan Karski.

Karski had been a young army lieutenant when the Soviets invaded his native Poland at the outbreak of World War II.

Captured near Ukraine, Karski managed to conceal his rank from his captors by swapping uniforms with a private. Uninterested in privates (they executed officers), the Soviets put Karski on a train bound west for Nazi territory; but he escaped, and made his way to Warsaw.

Before long, Karski joined Poland's Resistance, couriering dispatches to the country's government, exiled in Paris. On one trip, he was arrested by the Gestapo and tortured. Afraid he'd betray his fellows, Karski cut his own throat; but Nazi doctors stitched the wound before Karski bled to death. Members of the Resistance secreted him out of the hospital.

Karski immediately resumed his role as a courier. Ordered next to gather evidence of Nazi atrocities, he was twice smuggled by Jewish resistance fighters into the Warsaw Ghetto, to see first hand what was happening to its citizens. Karski witnessed Nazi soldiers hunt down and kill Jewish children for sport, and saw Jews herded into boxcars heading for the death camps. So sickened was he by the sights in the railroad yard, Karski vomited.

After his final mission in Poland, Karski was ordered to England and the US, to spread word of the Nazis' atrocities among the Allies. He met in 1943 with the British Foreign Secretary in London, and with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House. Karski pleaded with both men to intervene. His stories were met with disbelief.

Undaunted, Karski wrote Story of a Secret State, published in 1944 as a Book of the Month Club selection. Over 400,000 copies were sold. Unable to sway their leaders, Karski helped open the eyes of Brits and Americans to the Holocaust.

After the war, Karski remained in the US, earned a doctorate, and joined the faculty of Georgetown University, where he taught for 40 years.

In 1994, Karski was made an honorary citizen of Israel, in recognition of his efforts on behalf Holocaust victims. He was also nominated for a Nobel Prize shortly before his death in 2000.

There are public memorials to him today in Washington, New York City, Warsaw, Lodz, Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

Hero by Mistake

"The real hero is always a hero by mistake," Umberto Eco said. "He dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else."

Medievalist Raymond Klibansky was one of those heroes.

A German Jew, Klibansky worked as a philosophy professor at the University of Heidelberg in the early 1930s.

He was an expert in Nicholas of Cusa, another German philosopher who, 500 years before, had fathered "modernism" by arguing that science is superior to superstition.

Nazi ideologues drove Klibansky to England, where he found other teaching jobs. When England declared war on Germany in 1939, Klibansky took a government job in intelligence.

He used his intelligence job to warn every British and American air force officer he could reach that there was a target inside Germany they must not bomb: St. Nicholas Hospital, in the town of Bernkastel-Kues.

The hospital had been founded by Nicholas of Cusa, and housed his 500-year-old manuscripts—irreplaceable codebooks to the medieval mind.

Thanks to Klibansky's pleas, the Allies spared the building.

When the philosopher visited the town after the armistice in 1945, Bernkastel-Kues' citizens threw a party and gave Klibansky a hero's welcome.

The philosopher moved to Canada the following year, where he taught at McGill for the next 30 years, and lived and wrote to the venerable age of 100.

Eschew Inkhorn Terms

Queen Elizabeth's confidant Thomas Wilson warned writers away from fancy words 450 years ago in his Art of Rhetoric.

Wilson paid no court to "clerks" who used "outlandish English."

He called their fandangles "inkhorn terms"—words only pedants prefer.

Wilson warned:

Among all other lessons this should first be learned, that we never affect any strange inkhorn terms, but to speak as is commonly received: neither seeking to be over-fine or yet living over-careless, using our speech as most men do.

Think you're immune from Wilson's law, because yours is a C-level audience?

Think again.

Inkhorn terms could cost you credibility, no matter how well-paid your audience, says copywriter Keith Lewis.

Convoluted copy backfires, Lewis says. 

"Far from making you or your company sound intelligent, it alienates audiences. It turns them off, no matter how high up the income chain a potential reader might be."

2,200 Steps to Killer Content

Do the content marketers in your organization sit in cubicles all day?

They should know better.

Big ideas don't come from sitting.

As Nietzsche said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”

Writers have always understood walks are not trips around the block, but treks through idea-land.

Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau, Blake, Dickens, Woolf, Hemingway—all were avid walkers.

"The moment my legs begin to move,” Thoreau said, “my thoughts begin to flow.”

Why does walking work?

Because we don’t have to think hard when we do it.

Our minds are free to wander—and unleash a parade of images.

"Writing and walking are extremely similar feats," Ferris Jabr says in The New Yorker.

"When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps.

"Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands.

"Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts."

Two Stanford researchers have, in fact, shown that walking boosts creativity by 60%.

So, here are the steps to killer content.

Go outdoors.

Walk a mile.

Come back.

Kill it.

Thinkers Thrive

Sales gurus call the ultimate customer relationship that of "trusted advisor."

But what is a trusted advisor?

"A trusted advisor is an expert, someone who brings you a new idea or teaches you something she has learned about your industry," Jim Clifton, CEO of Gallup, told members of the Direct Marketing Association of Washington at last night's annual meeting.

If you're not your customers' trusted advisor, you'll inevitably have to compete on price alone, Clifton said. 

And inevitably go broke in the process.

Of course, you can stay off the radar and earn the trusted advisor label by dint of hard work.

Or you can use a little marketing to help you by cementing your stance as a "thought leader."

Becoming a thought leader is a six-step process, says blogger Maddy Osman.

1. Follow and comment on news in your niche

Make connections that will alert you to breaking news, then toss in your two cents. "Finding ways to make industry connections will help your company move from news consumer to news creator," Osman says.

2. Be disagreeable

Thought leaders find ""the sweet spot between saying something that not everyone will agree with, and completely stirring the pot with a controversial opinion."

3. Be nice

Be generous with praise and thanks for those who engage with and support you.

4. Hunt for exposure

Seek and jump on every opportunity to collaborate on a content marketing project.

5. Be charitable

Except for perhaps an email address, don't ask people for anything in return for your thoughts.

6. Get out and speak

Speak at and sponsor key industry conferences, and never refuse speaking opportunities at smaller events.

There's Something Happening Here

I'm an optimist.

But I can't resist thinking about Sinclair Lewis once in a while.

His 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, portrayed the election to the presidency of a populist, on his promise to make America great again.

Once in office, the new president outlaws dissent, tossing opponents into concentration camps and arming his stooges to keep the citizenry in check.

Dissidents who aren't imprisoned turn for help to a secret organization, the "New Underground," which smuggles them into Canada.

But as befits all tyrants, the president is eventually ousted in a White House coup. 

His successor, to create employment for the millions of jobless, declares war on Mexico.

But the war is unpopular and sparks nationwide unrest. The unrest provides an opportunity for the dissidents to return from Canada. They quickly form a resistance movement.

Civil war erupts in the final chapters.

NOTE: Opinions are my own.

No Agony, No Ecstasy

Like popes of old, today's venture capitalists have no patience with the tortured perfectionist.

"Perfection has no business in the world of entrepreneurship," Charlie Harary says in Entrepreneur.

Today's marketplace is "supersonic," so entrepreneurs must tightly cap opportunity costs—and quality.

He quotes LinkedIn founder Reed Hoffman: "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."

Products need only be "minimally viable," Harary says, and businesses thick-skinned.

"A little criticism or failure never killed anyone. Learn to embrace it and use it to make you great."

In other words, scrap excellence for the quick buck and one day you, too, will run a respected company.

This wolfish mindset explains why so many of the apps we buy are broken; the books, riddled with typos; the drugs, full of dangerous side effects.

It's not because we lack talent.

It's because we're in such a goddamned hurry.

As novelist Irving Stone said in The Agony and the Ecstasy, “Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive."

On the Shoulders of Giants

"We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants."

—John of Salisbury

Two neighborhoods in my fair city, Washington, DC, take their names from giants we've all but forgotten.

Oliver Howard graduated from West Point in the 1850s and was sent to fight Seminoles. While encamped in the Everglades, he was "born again." His peers would forever after mock his piety.

An abolitionist, in 1861 Howard found himself leading Union troops at Bull Run. A year later, he lost his right arm at Seven Pines, but would return from the hospital three months later to fight at Second Bull Run and Antietam. In subsequent years, Howard led bluecoats into battle at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Chattanooga, Atlanta and Savannah.

After the war, Howard was made commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He believed former slaves would most benefit from education, and in 1867 started Howard University in Washington.

Robert Shaw, the fair-haired son of a family of Boston abolitionists, dropped out of Harvard in 1859, uncertain how to spend his life. When the Confederate states seceded two years later, he enlisted in the Union army, soon reaching the rank of colonel.

While home convalescing from a wound received at Antietam, Shaw was tapped to organize the 54th Massachusetts, one of the North's first regiments of African American troops. Sent to South Carolina as manual labor, the regiment was soon chosen to spearhead an ill-fated assault on a Confederate fort outside Charleston.

In the attack, Shaw's exposed troops were shredded by artillery and musket fire, but their remnants managed to reach and scale the ramparts. During brutal hand-to-hand combat inside the fort, Shaw was killed.

The Confederate general in charge refused to return Shaw’s body to the Union army after the fight. To show his contempt for a white man who would lead black troops, the general tossed Shaw's body into a common burial trench. After the war, Shaw's family chose to leave their son's body there, his father remarking they couldn't wish for him better company.

While you wait in line for your latte, celebrate February 29, the bonus day of Black History Month, by Tweeting this post. Include the hashtag #ShouldersOfGiants.

Fish Story

Here's a story with a hook.

Skift reports SeaWorld's CEO, after denying his employees posed as animal rights activists to infiltrate PETA, has admitted to conducting a covert operation.

In a report to stockholders, Joel Manby acknowledged corporate spies were sent by SeaWorld "to maintain the safety and security of employees, customers and animals in the face of credible threats.”

But a PETA spokesperson says SeaWorld sent agents provocateurs to bait PETA's people.

“SeaWorld’s corporate espionage campaign tried to coerce kind people into setting SeaWorld on fire or draining its tanks, which would have hurt the animals, in an attempt to distract from its cruelty and keep PETA from exposing the miserable lives of the animals it imprisons,” Tracy Reiman said.

SeaWorld's spokespeople have clammed up, claiming further comment would disclose "confidential business information related to the company’s security practices."

SeaWorld has been angling to fix its damaged brand for three years, after the movie Blackfish sent park attendance reeling and put profits in the tank.

As a case study in floundering PR, this one's a keeper.

Where Do You Draw the Line?

Admirable work only results when creatives draw the line, Seth Godin says in his recent post, "Milton Glaser's Rule:"

"There are few illustrators who have a more recognizable look (and a longer productive career) than Milton Glaser," Godin says. 

"Here's the thing: When he started out, he wasn't THE Milton Glaser. He was some guy hoping for work.

"The rule, then, is that you can't give the client what he wants. You have to give the client work that you want your name on. Work that's part of the arc. Work that reflects your vision, your contribution and your hand.

"That makes it really difficult at first. Almost impossible. But if you ignore this rule because the pressure is on, it will never get easier."

Agency exec Bill Kircher (my former boss) used to spout similar adages when the pressure was on. I'll sum them up in a rule I'll call "Kircher's Law:"

Whenever an agency bows to a client's creative direction, the probability of later incrimination approaches 100%.

Although creatives are quick to cite their duty to themselves, the truth is, every professional shares the right to draw the line.

Remember the film The King's Speech? 

Early in the story, the therapist draws the line with a haughty Queen Elizabeth: "Sorry, this is my game, played on my turf, by my rules."

But with prerogative comes accountability. You can't have your kingly cake and eat it, too. 

Do you:

• Respect everyone, coworkers and clients alike?
• Arrive on site ready to work?
• Tackle chores that need to be done to stay in business?
• Avoid short cuts and excuses?
• Learn from mistakes?
• Consider how your decisions affect the company, not just your department or career?
• Speak truthfully and with the passion of an owner?

Do you—where do you—draw the line?

Content Marketing and the Agony of Defeat

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Digital agency Sticky Content asked 283 marketers what's defeating their content efforts.

Their answers are no surprise:

• 37% said they have no strategy

• 33% said management dings content

• 46% said demands change after content has been created

• 66% said their organizations waste a quarter of all content; 15% said, half

Is your organization lumbering toward self-defeat? If so, ask:

• Is management serious, or not, about content? Are they merely entranced by this year's "shiny object?" If they're in earnest, then what's our strategy?

• Do reviewers understand what to approve? Message? Accuracy? Style? The reason the content exists? What are the ground-rules?

• Does management trust the content creators? If not, why not? Do they rewrite the lawyers' briefs and the developers' code, too?

• Does management care about waste? One way to boost marketing's ROI isn't to create more content, but to publish and promote what's been created.

• Can I improve things? Or is our situation impossible? (Remember what Napoleon said: "Impossible is a word found only in the dictionary of fools.")

Do You Chase Butterflies?

Remember the sunny feeling you had as a child when you chased butterflies?

If you do that in business, you're begging for trouble.

In a recent blog post, event-design guru Jeff Hurt laments the fact that most workers sacrifice impact for busyness.

"I’ve seen way too many professionals addicted to cleaning out all the emails or making progress on their list of tasks instead of spending time doing the right thing," Hurt says.

"We’ve got to retrain our brains that strategic thinking first is more important than a check mark. We’ve got to rewire our brains to realize that strategy leads to more success than our busyness."

I've witnessed another, equally toxic habit that plagues many professionals, particularly senior executives, marketers and sales managers.

That habit is chasing butterflies, the mindless pursuit of fugitive opportunities; an addiction to chasing every papery grail of growth that happens to flutter by (usually far off the path of the core business or audience).

Like busyness, chasing butterflies feels good.

Focus, its opposite, doesn't—especially when there are so many lovely distractions about.

Focus isn't easy. 

Focus isn't fun.

But it's a habit you have to adopt, if you want to have impact.

Just ask Marissa Mayer.

Adaptability is Our Secret

Kimberley Hardcastle-Geddes contributed today's post. She is president of San Diego-based mdg, a marketing agency that currently serves 10 of the Trade Show Executive Gold 100.

Given the pace at which the media landscape continues to evolve, it’s impossible to say (with any degree of certainty) what mdg will look like in five years. 

That’s precisely why, when evaluating new candidates for employment, we look less at their current skill set and more at their proven ability to learn new skills. My business partner, Vinnie Polito, and I make it our mission to hire the right people, have in place the right processes, and create the right culture to allow us to adapt to meet the ever-changing demands of the clients we serve.

Most recently, we’ve met these changing demands by enhancing our offerings in specialty areas and hiring more professionals skilled in digital marketing, coding, video production, international marketing, database marketing and public relations. Our clients’ needs in these areas are becoming more significant, yet they don’t have the corresponding internal resources (nor the desire and budgets to develop them internally), which enables us to efficiently and effectively fill gaps. Over the next five years, we’ll continue operating under the same general philosophy, developing new business units that align with evolving demand.

We’ll also stay focused on delivering results. While we believe in the power of a strong brand, we know that our clients hire mdg based on the agency’s proven ability to increase attendance, grow membership, enhance the bottom line or achieve whatever objective happens to be at the forefront of their marketing plans. 

mdg has built a reputation over the past 39 years for an ability to effect real change, and will continue reinforcing that reputation over the next five.

Tomorrow's Agencies Will be More Consultative

Rick Whelan contributed today's post. He is president of Marketing General, a full-service membership marketing agency based in Alexandria, VA.

What will my agency look like five years from now?

We’ll look exactly the same, but different. 

I say the same, because the need for great strategy, consulting, creativity, program implementation and back-end results reporting and analysis will be the same; but different because the speed at which all the components will be needed, and the constant evolution of tools, technique and technology, will force us out of our comfort zone. We'll have to test new media and new methods to get ever better, faster results for our clients, all for less cost.

Other changes I think we’ll see are fewer full-time on-site staff, and the increased use of freelance specialists worldwide who are employed for their expertise in a certain areas and for a particular project or program, and then let go until they are needed again. This will maximize my agency’s talent pool, but also allow me the convenience of “just in time” experts to match clients' needs, budgets and expectations.

One thing that will not change is the need for some sort of agency orchestration of all the moving parts of a marketing campaign. If anything, agencies will be more much more consultative in nature and challenged to prove and then reprove their worth to a client over and over. 

Finally the biggest change (and one that's been building all along) will be the use of better, bigger and more encompassing data on prospects and customers alike to drive all facets of the marketing spend.

Series continues.

A Team of Trusted Advisors

Jean Whiddon contributed today's post. She is president and CEO of Fixation Marketing, a woman-owned, full-service marketing communications company based in Bethesda, MD.

Last week I met with a new primary care doctor. As I approached the desk of the new practice, I noticed a significant display of business cards: on the left, about 10 card holders for the primary care docs; on the right, a smaller cluster for the related specialists. Ah, I thought, one-stop shopping for integrated medical care.

I bring this up because the medical practice somewhat mirrors my vision for the marketing firm of five years from now. 

At the center is a core of hands-on creative strategists and designers, able to conceive, write and/or help execute the solid building blocks of an effective multimedia campaign—advertising, direct mail, email, websites, print and digital collateral. They’re agile, experienced and savvy (clients are in a hurry, so they need adept problem solvers). 

In our “one stop shop” for strategic campaigns, the extended team includes “specialist partners,” incorporating, but not limited, to a researcher, media planner, SEO/SMM/SEM pro, developer and focus group/meeting facilitator. All these subject matter masters may be independent, but are vetted, curated and managed by Fixation with complete transparency (and with as much direct contact as warranted between client and partner). It’s a model that’s heavy on custom collaboration and light on overhead, because that’s what works best.

What a far different model than the “all in-house” agency I joined nearly 25 years ago, but one driven by client needs and a changing marketplace. And really, it’s been evolving for a long time.

Series continues.

Personalization and Flexibility Will Define Agencies in the Future

Kevin Miller provided today's post. He is president and chief strategist of Frost Miller, a Bethesda, MD-based integrated marketing firm that provides a complete range of marcom services.

Five years from now our agency will pretty much look the same as today—smart folks sitting around eating donuts and creating results-driven marketing campaigns.

Broadly speaking, there are three overarching trends that will help shape how our agency works:

1. Strategy, planning and execution are becoming intertwined

2. Digital marketing is getting more personal

3. The more things change, the more they stay the same

It used to be that the only way to achieve a client’s marketing goals was to develop a strategy, put a plan together, and then execute that plan. That’s all changing. 

With real-time measurement of digital campaigns, tactics—and even strategies—can be changed immediately. Underperforming campaigns get replaced with ones that generate better results. But in order to improve performance, the people producing these campaigns will have to be strategic thinkers who can make changes on the fly.

An unfathomable amount of personal data about customers is allowing marketers to target very specific audiences. Targeting once achievable only through direct mail lists or Nielsen ratings—which only tracked the broadest audience characteristics—is now done through technologies that allow you to know exactly who, and where, your prospects are. Mobile, Facebook and Google lead the way, but this trend will reshape how we market in years ahead.

Telecommuting, virtual workspaces, and other trends that affect most types of businesses won’t have such a big impact on agencies. That’s because what makes a good agency great is collaboration—especially in an integrated marketing agency like ours. Sharing ideas among people with diverse individual skills leads to the development of fully integrated, and more successful, campaigns.

Series continues.

What Will Our Agency Look Like Five Years from Now?

Gary Slack provided today's post. He is chief experience officer of Slack and Company, LLC, a leading global B2B marketing strategy and services provider based in Chicago.

What will we look like in five years?

We're going to be much more diverse.

Mirroring clients, more people with engineering, science and software backgrounds. A data scientist or two and even people with nutrition, life sciences and other technical training. 

Practically everyone will be coders. “Growth hacker,” a term emerging from Silicon Valley, will describe more of us.

More people who see themselves as marketing technologists.

More experiential specialists, as events, private and public, are only going to grow.

More B2B e-commerce experts (although we already have four), as this area will boom and bloom big time.

More B2B sales and marketing strategy experts. We’ve already taken some of this kind of work from McKinsey.

Probably a professional comedian or two to create “edutainment” to capture more attention and interest. Look at what Tim Washer has done for Cisco. Hiring journalists for content will be old hat.

More history majors. They just “get” the outside world better.

More senior women, although we’re not doing badly.

More African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Indians and Muslims. All to better mirror B2B buyers and clients.

Not just homegrown diversity. More people coming our way from exchange programs with the 30 members of WorldwideB2BPartners, our global B2B agency network.

For sure, no prima donnas, jerks or worse. Actually, we're already pretty good here by hiring team players and asking every new employee to read Choosing Civility.

As many dreamers and woolgatherers as we can find.

And, finally, a bunch more slackers. We just can’t get enough of ‘em!

Series continues.

Compartmentalized Thinking

In the 1980s, when mapmaking kingpin Rand McNally first saw the signs of coming industry disruption, what did it do?

It unleashed an all-out PR campaign to persuade carmakers and consumers to call the "glove compartment" the "map compartment."

Duh.

While thinking like that might have worked in the 1950s, by the 1980s it was nothing other than magical thinking.

Magical thinking, psychologists say, is a product of Darwin's "struggle for existence." When faced with an existential threat, we look for saviors everywhere, as Rand McNally did.

Sometimes those saviors are efficiency experts; more often, salespeople; most often, marketers.

But when your industry's fragile, none of those folks can save you.

To borrow a thought from the 1990s, you have to think different.

Go Ahead, Back Up

As January's "Snowzilla" bore down on the Nation's Capital, the head of DC's Metro told The Washington Post it was wiser to shutter his incompetent agency during the storm than tread "a false floor that everybody knows is false.”

While candid, the exec's expression of foreboding " may not soothe the frustrations of stranded customers," The Post said.

It's easy for customers to blame failures of government on lack of drive (in fact, it's a hobby of mine).

But then you can't explain the shipwrecks of driven profiteers like Target, which last year lost $7 billion on its calamitous rollout of Target Canada.

Its also easy for customers to blame failures of government on "pointy-headed" government execs. 

But then you can't explain the blunders of smart CEOs like Carla Fiorina, who halved HP's stock value while she ran the company.

So what's to blame for systemic failures—both public and private?

As turnaround experts observe, it's leadership's refusal to abandon a strategy that simply doesn't work (like the one illustrated in this insightful video).