On the day after the 2016 election, I had the good luck of being forced to prepare for a guest lecture at SF State. It gave me something constructive to do, rather than just mope around the house all day (my wife thanked the state of California). And, as it turned out, the subject of the class was relevant and timely: a comparison of the strategies and circumstances in the 2012 and 2016 elections (you can check out the presentation here). And as I told the class, I actually played a small role in the 2012 election, so I had some insider knowledge. But in the last election, I participated only as a student of "the art and science of modern marketing," which keeps evolving -- though some say devolving -- each election cycle.
I'm returning tomorrow evening to SF State with an evolved POV, and a mission. It's been more than six months, and I've had ample time to reflect more on what actually happened, and how what happened might impact the future of my profession. As always, I'm trying to keep it simple, so I've begun advising my marketing colleagues to think about a new mnemonic for remembering the three skills that will soon matter most.
The New Three C's
The first is communication, which -- as I have written many times before -- has been forever transformed in the age of big content.
Never has it been more important for leaders (a) to understand storytelling and (b) understand how to create content that carries their stories. Most every marketing leader I have met has already accepted this reality, and the reality goes by the name of content marketing.
The second "C" is community, which has also become a common practice because the rise of new digital tools that make it a bit easier to engage people at scale. Again, most leaders in marketing get this, even if many are struggling to do it well.
But today there's a third "C" potentially on the rise, but very few marketers, I suspect, are yet thinking about it. It's called conciliation -- the art and science of positively engaging and aligning with people who are different. It also goes by the name of conflict resolution, a discipline which has a large community of practice, but outside the world of marketing.
In future articles, I'll dive deeper into the challenges and complexities of each these disciplines. For now, I'll just sketch what I see as the principal reasons why conflict resolution will soon matter to more marketers.
For me, it all begins with what we learned about our country during the last election: we are deeply divided, and the divisions are putting enormous pressure on civic leaders to find ways to engage “the other,” people with whom they have never spoken with, let alone broken bread. It’s not just Congress that's gridlocked. Our nation itself is in a holding pattern, and leaders have an opportunity and obligation to reach out across the aisle and find ways to make common cause.
But it’s not just in the civic arena where I see opportunity. As I've observed in my work over the past few years, for a business to achieve “alignment” with a their many different stakeholders -- particularly employees -- is exceedingly difficult. Why: more and more relevant voices are competing for their attention in digital/mobile environments. The Filter Bubble -- our tendency to listen only to people we're comfortable with -- is alive in the enterprise as well. It’s incumbent on leaders to burst that bubble and find ways to unite their people.
Finally, and more decisively, conflict resolution might rise as a new core competency because of the fundamentals of storytelling itself: it's actually embedded in story structure. Every good story follows a journey that begins with the hero’s purpose, who is then confronted by conflict, and then finds resolution to that conflict. On the surface, the meaning of those two words juxtaposed appears to be different from the thing we call "conflict resolution." But that’s only because we tend to think of story as the journey of a single person, not the journey of a community that's coming together by resolving its common challenges.
The Talking Stick
For marketers, all it might take to see the new opportunity is to reflect on one of the original purposes of storytelling.
In an ancient ritual that we now call “the talking stick," tribal elders would seek unity by encouraging younger members to retell tribal tales in their own words. As anyone who has attended a modern version of the ritual, the sharing of stories and personal testimonials helps to forge bonds because it helps to humanize “the other" with a common story. It's an amazing thing, both moving and effective, which is why the talking stick has survived in modern times, most conspicuously in the world of community organizing. But the challenge for marketers today -- a collective journey worth pursuing -- is to develop a more modern version of the talking stick so they can engage more people at scale. Already, a few forward-looking organizations are doing that, and I look forward to profiling them soon.
