Guerrilla thinking

That’s it.
It’s all in the title.

We had the chance to talk to some of our fellow Italy-based GTs a couple of days ago.
Frustration was all over the air. 
The web in Italy is failing. Not used to its all potential. 

Here are the answers to the question: why are Italian companies failing on the web?

1) MOST OF THE PEOPLE IN COMPANIES ARE TOO OLD AND PROUD

Don’t misunderstand us. It’s not a matter of real age. But it is surely a matter of MENTAL age and disposition. People taking decisions in Italy are too often unable to understand the trends and follow the market. They are stuck into their product/brand state of mind and unwilling to think as a consumer.
Even when they pretend to do it, they always universalize their point of view.

You can hear them say: “I would never tweet” , “I don’t use Foursquare”, without understanding that there are many, so many other people that actually would and do.
Rather than getting them to trust their agency, this incapacity plays on their pride and get them up to themselves and ultimately in the position not to understand what is being proposed.

2) NOBODY EVER TAKES THE RISK TO DECIDE ANYTHING

Think about it. How many times have you held a 3 HOURS presentation to a large audience of people in a room and heard right afterwards that they would present that to their “boss” and decide?
In Italian companies (or at least in big ones) only a few people take the risk to decide. The rest of them simply flow from one presentation to the other, unable to even express their own opinion.
You can see that for yourself. Next time you hold a presentation, ask to your interlocutors what they think about it.
If the boss is in the room, you will see that nobody will ever talk before him/her.
And when they do, they will simply go after their boss.
People working in Italian companies are FOLLOWERS by nature.
But how can you expect a brand carried by followers to be a leader? You can’t.

3) MARKETING PEOPLE DON’T KNOW THE DIGITAL MARKET

This sounds funny, doesn’t it? 
When you hear the word “marketing” you might expect that these people actually study, know and deepen their market. But when you face them in a meeting you soon realize they don’t.
Sure, iF they sell, let’s say, coffee they might know many things about coffee but they don’t really never know how the coffee is discussed, loved, hated and connected to their target online.
Never have our Italian GTs found during their presentations to clients someone sitting on the other end of the table able to give them a vision of their digital awareness and reputation and a clear brief of their goals.
“Digital” is a word that means a lot and nothing to them.
Most of them still think that it actually means having or creating a website.
Too many times you can hear them saying silly things like “Facebook is for kids” or “Youtube can’t make money, it will close sooner or later”. 
Truth is that they rarely even have a Facebook account. 
There’s no passion, no real interest.
They read an article in a newspaper and they think they know it all. The problem is that the article is written by another Italian average market thinker who pretends to be a guru but it’s just, most of the times, a jackass.

4) PEOPLE IN ITALIAN COMPANIES LACK IN PASSION FOR THEIR JOB (AND LIFE)

Communicating a brand/product is one of the best jobs you might happen to have.
But you can’t live it as a day by day career.

In order to really succeed and make a difference you must live it as a passion.
You must be curious about people. You must ask yourself questions like: what do they do? where do they do it? And most importantly: WHY do they do it?

This is even more true when you are talking of the digital landscape.
After all, the web is all about passion and love.

But people working in the marketing areas of most Italian companies just don’t get it.
And they really don’t do this anymore. They pay zillions euros to idiot research agencies that will pop out a million slides powerpoint to say nothing that you can easily understand going out in the streets for yourself.

Please Italian guys, stop sitting on the throne of your brand growing a fat ass.
Go out, breathe, listen to the people, get them to talk, use a bus, get on a train, LIVE and watch.
And learn.

That will do a lot more for your work than any research can do.
And you will stop failing.

It is sometime great to just sit down and think of the good old times.

Days when you didn’t have a cell phone or a pager. 
Days when being out of the office just meant to be out of reach.
Days when the the word “urgent” meant “to be done within tomorrow” not “within an hour”.

That’s probably why when the Internet came we all thought it couldn’t be anything harmful.

We thought the freedom we had conquered through the ages had finally come to its higher level. We were excited and ready for a new era.

A time of freedom when we would work at home or anywhere in the world and whenever we like. Being office-free and connected would represent the beginning of true freedom and liberation from an ancient way of living our work.

The most talented among us imagined themselves in the woods or by the sea with a device in their hands able to let them do their jobs in the most efficient way from a distance.

As far as that prediction is concerned, it was true.
Alas, the messianic view of upcoming history was not. Absolutely not.

Infact, never before in history have workers been so much chained to their daily business activities like nowadays.

We are not obviously saying that the web is the evil.
But it is time to look at some facts of our daily work and leisure life and make some considerations.
The web promised we would be more free, we would have more time for our personal life and would be more updated and aware.

Were these promises fulfilled? Were our expectations met?
Not really, not for everyone at least. Here’s why.

1) PEOPLE WORK MORE (IN OR OUTSIDE THE OFFICE). AND THEY THINK IT’S COOL

Nobody can deny this. Ever since the Internet came we work more than before.
We work in the office, on the bus/subway/car to our home. We often work at home.
We work during the weekends at the mountains.
Working late has become cool.
But please, keep in mind that reading your emails on the latest tablet or smartphone may look great and awesome, but it’s always work. 
Next time you send an email with a report/presentation to your boss during a weekend you would be supposed to spend having fun with your friends, take a moment to shoot a picture to yourself with your new 8 MEGAPIXEL camera smartphone.
Look at you: you are a nerd monkey. Sad but true. 

2) WORK AND PRIVATE LIFE HAVE BECOME THE SAME

Because people work too much and more than before, they tend not develop their own social sphere and to familiarize too much with their colleagues.
Coworkers became a sort of a family for them and this lead them to spend more time at the office and to share their spare time with them.
Of course they often end up talking about work and in the end… working.
Work and private life mix together, so that the time people would spend for minding their own business becomes extra-non-paid time they dedicate to someone else’s.

4) PEOPLE ARE MORE AND MORE IGNORANT

As said in a previous post in this blog, the wide and infinite amount of information available on the web, got people to think they don’t need to know anything.
Google has the answer.
And people have become to lazy to deepen any subject. And they don’t.
Unless it’s a part of their job, they won’t deepen anything. Simply because they know they could whenever needed. And they could do it in a couple of clicks.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

The web has the power to change our perception of reality and get people together to change the world.
But the way it has been used so far reflects our own attitude and perception of the world rather than our will to change it or improve it.
We let our society eat and adapt the web to an ancient model of living and working.
In other words we think the power of the web is yet to show its full potential.

1) DON’T LIE

Many marketing and advertising people lie.
Because they have been lying for many years. The lied for years to the audience in their tv spot promising benefits and things that their actual products could just not really give.

If you have a bit of history in the advertising market on your shoulder as we do, you’re surely familiar to sentences like: “we can’t say this in the ad” or “actually this product is the same as competitors but costs more”. But this is over.

Or at least brands and agencies can’t keep lying as they did so far. Not on the web.
The power of the web is immense. if you are unable to fulfill with a real benefit the expectations you rise while communicating your brand/product the web will eat you.

That’s why the first and most important rule for a successful digital strategy is to be honest. To be ethical and sell things for what they really are.
Accept discussions and advices to improve.
By doing so you will understand that in a web perspective, your product is under constant scrutiny: you don’t have to look good enough. You have to BE good enough. 

2) DON’T BE MULTICHANNEL IF THAT DOESN’T ADD VALUE TO THE STRATEGY

Having a campaign or a project that is multichannel is cool.
But having a crapy advertising that’s spamming users on their iPads, iPhones, macs, pcs,androids it’s not.
Every channel has its own rules (we will see them in another post) and purposes.
Develop an iPhone app that basically gives you information about a product that you can easily find browsing google on your phone it’s pointless.

An app should make the product somewhat interactive. As much as a digital signage should add more value to your being somewhere outdoor. 
Don’t be anxious.

Think about what you want to do with every channel and how that channel could/should add  value to your customer experience. If it does not don’t activate it and focus on those who do.

3)  RECONSIDER THE ROLE OF MEDIA

Your media strategist will tell you he thought of a very good clustered display campaign. He will tell you that you can be on a main news portal or in a niche website that fits perfectly to your product.

Don’t trust that monkey. Most of the times he doesn’t really know what he’s saying.
And you can tell it by his presentations: hundreds and hundreds of charts, a giant excel to tell you in the end that you must spend a lot of money to generate AWARENESS

Now, what’s awareness online anyways? If you spend a lot in display advertising people will certainly be aware that your exist. But as soon as you stop investing it won’t take long for them to forget. 

So ask yourself what you want to achieve. Is it short-term awareness or long-term relationship?  
Long-term awareness is not an option through digital advertising, unless you plan to keep investing money for a very long time.

But even if you did, there are 2 things to keep in mind:

a) The fact that people are aware that you exist doesn’t mean they have a connection to you. Awareness is good online if it calls to an action, if it involves you in some ways. 

b)  In the digital sphere Too much display-generated awareness also translates as SPAM. Think about it. You are reading your email  or browsing some websites and you keep on seeing the same message… pretty annoying, isn’t it?
When it comes to the web repetition might not just be good for your marketing.

FINAL CONSIDERATION

Follow these 3 rules and apply them to your digital strategies and you will not fail.
Though simple and understandable, they are too often forgotten by “web makers” because they are focused in getting the client to do more and more (and pay more and more). Don’t make that mistake.
A strategy is not a tactic. While the second is more immediate and apparently rewarding, the first takes time to show results but leads to better satisfaction for you and your clients.

Is it just us Guerrilla Thinkers or do you also think the web is getting kind of boring?

Don’t misunderstand us, we don’t mean that there is no relevant content or things to read/play and/or be entertained.
It’s just that sitting in front of a screen with a million options turns us not to really want any of them.

When you know you could be watch any movie in a click, or find any article, any news.
Learn any language, see any place in the world… then you happen not to want to do anything.

The paradox of the web overflow of information is that we are less interested in deepening anything because we know we might do that in a second if required.
The total and immediate availability of information causes the loss of interest.

Maybe is the lack of discovery. After all we were all born to search the world.
Ever since our beginning, mankind has struggled to survive and to find the resources needed to face its daily life.
Every day has always been a challenge to survive.
This is a mark in our DNA we can’t erase. We always need to be challenged and this need gave birth through the ages to our science, art and, in the end, culture.
The web and GooGle flatten the need to discover.

On the other hand the web is getting bored because it is not changing.
It is not like saying that the impact of the internet hasn’t changed the lives of billions of people.  It’s just that your Internet experience today is not much difference than it was 5 years ago. Think about it: no big changes at all.
Sure, you might just argue that web 2.0 demonstrates that the web is evolving.
But it is exactly the contrary.
The social media so called ‘evolution’ clearly outlines that the web is not changing at all.
It shows that the web is becoming a platform, a standard.
Rather than moving, it is becoming more and more still. 

This is a common phenomenon for any technology. It was like this for cars, tv, radios and planes.
Take cars for example. In the beginning there were many different ideas about how to develop them, but then one standard emerged and ever since the whole car industry became something to be taken pretty much for granted. And in the end boring.
Apart from side kicks car industry keeps on adding to our car experience (such as radio, satellite navigation, mp3s reader and so on…) a car is basically…. a car. 4 wheels and an engine that take you from A to B.

And that’s the web. A place were you can find whatever you need.
A platform where you can share and send anything. And so what?
Not really a “wow” feeling when you read it like this, right?

Truth is that the 30/40 y.o. generation saw it coming and it really changed the way they lived their lives. But that thrust is over.
Younger generation will see it pretty much as we see cars today. Something you need to accomplish your everyday tasks. Nothing more.