Unfiltered Marketing

5 Rules to Win Back Trust, Credibility, and Customers in a Digitally Distracted World

Stephen Denny

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781632657572
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Unfiltered Marketing 's big ideas apply to business strategy, marketing, and the future of the brand/consumer relationship. It is a playbook for managers and for anyone interested in the ever-changing interaction between technology and culture.

“Denny and Leinberger capture the profound truths and deep realities of leading and marketing in a rapidly evolving world of digital platforms.” —Blake Irving, former CEO of GoDaddy

You can fake authenticity. But in this digitally saturated age, your customers will see through any misdirection.

As we are constantly on our electronic devices, we have come to distrust curated media and traditional PR. Stephen Denny and Paul Leinberger have found that people now want to make their own decisions based on raw footage, real-time updates, and unfiltered livestreams. How, then, do marketing executives and others gain consumer trust? These Fortune 500 consultants present the answer in Unfiltered Marketing.

Drawing on four years of global research, authors Denny and Leinberger have developed a comprehensive five-step process for successfully rehumanizing the digital brand experience and gaining customer loyalty. To follow it, companies must understand that consumers are (1) seeking control in an out-of-control world; and executives must rework their brand to be (2) unscripted, (3) in-process, and (4) in-context, in order to master (5) heroic credibility (brands standing by their philosophy and values). Abiding by these rules, businesses follow in the successful footsteps of brands like Patagonia, T-Mobile, adidas, GoDaddy, and others.

PART 1

The Rules

The five rules that we're presenting in the following chapters are based on our multiyear Culture & Technology Intersection study, which we first launched in 2016. We set out to explore the impact of technology on culture as it relates to the brands we buy, the digital footprints we manage, and the work we do in an increasingly distributed workplace. Our consulting work with clients, ranging from Fortune 500s to global multinationals to highly motivated, “Giant Killer” mid- caps, has helped us hone this message and accelerate what many have come to see as a revolutionary way of seeing their respective businesses.

These are not statements or observations about the likely future.

These are actionable insights, big concepts that if carefully implemented can change the trajectory of your business, your campaign, or even the evolution of your personal brand.

Read them as such. Apply them as you are able.

Let's start with the first big macro trend— one that underpins everything that is to follow: seeking control in an out- of- control world.

CHAPTER 1

Rule #1: Seeking Control in an Out-of-Control World

But out of the gobbledygook, comes a very clear thing . . . you can't trust the government . . . you can't believe what they say . . . and you can't rely on their judgment . . . and the—the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this . . .

—H. R. Haldeman, chief of staff,
Monday, June 14, 1971, 3:09 p.m.,
quoted from audio recordings taken during
a meeting with President Richard Nixon in the
Oval Office on the release of the Pentagon Papers

THE SEEDS OF DISILLUSIONMENT—PENTAGON PAPERS, 1971

We always prefer to view history through our own personal and recent experience, but before the Panama Papers, before Wikileaks and Julian Assange, and before Edward Snowden, there was Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

Looking back to the early 1970s from a technology perspective is virtually impossible for many, but it's critically important to understand not only the cultural impact of this foundational event but also the long odds it overcame to make it into the public eye. We assume that leaks and exposure of carefully hidden lies and other misdeeds are a function of cell phone cameras, flash drives, and Tor uploads. This event makes Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers so instructive because the lack of access to what most of us in the twenty-first century would even recognize as technology makes the contrast with modern examples all the more striking.

There have been ample books, movies, and articles published that outline the story, with varying degrees of drama. Daniel Ellsberg's resumé following his receiving a PhD in economics from Harvard shows tenures at the Pentagon, the State Department, and later at RAND Corporation, where he contributed to a top-secret study on the conduct of the Vietnam War. While compiling the RAND study, however, Ellsberg became aware of evidence that the Lyndon Johnson administration had used falsified information to bolster its case for expanding American military involvement in the Vietnam War. Ellsberg's conscience wouldn't let him ignore what he was seeing. His decision to make copies of the top-secret report and other related documents and send them to the press and select members of Congress began a domino effect that culminated in a Supreme Court case giving the publishers the green light to print the documents in their entirety. Ellsberg was shortly thereafter found innocent of all charges after it surfaced that government agents with a direct reporting relationship to those close to the White House had engaged in a series of dirty tricks, including burglarizing Mr. Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to look for embarrassing material and attempting to poison him with LSD at a public event to incapacitate him.

How do we gauge the impact of the Pentagon Papers? Their publication didn't stop the Vietnam War, which continued for another four years. Absent the newly released movies and other pop culture references to this event, most contemporary readers under the age of fifty would never have known what they were or why they were important.

The cultural impact of the Pentagon Papers must include that it contributed to the sentiment of unrest that embodied the 1960s and early 1970s, particularly as it related to the eventual downfall of the Nixon administration. But perhaps more importantly, the publication of the documents accomplished two critical goals. First, they educated the American people, for the first time, that we the people couldn't trust the government, couldn't trust their judgment, and could no longer view the office of the presidency as something infallible—which from a cultural perspective was a clear departure from the past. Second, given the subsequent Supreme Court ruling allowing the press to go to print with the top-secret documents, they shifted the balance of power from those holding the secrets—the government—to those exposing those secrets to the public.

It's this second impact that concerns us most in this discussion: a US Supreme Court decision ruling allowed anyone in a journalistic position to publish highly sensitive information, even to the point of being classified as top secret, in the service of the public interest. For those in the US, the impact of this decision clearly emboldens “leakers of conscience” and sets the precedent that those exposing wrong-doing—from either public or private sector sources—are to be supported and believed.

The Pentagon Papers ultimately brought down the Nixon presidency, mostly due to the president's and his inner circle's reaction to their publication. The threatened impeachment and ultimate resignation of a sitting president was an earth-shaking cultural moment for the United States. And trust in the institution has never fully recovered.

EXPOSURE IN THE AGE OF INSTANT ACCESS

Fast-forward to the present, and we see so many examples of highprofile leaks—in terms of importance, volume, and frequency—that the Pentagon Papers, were they to break today, might feel like a marginally newsworthy story. Julian Assange and Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, and others are ever-present in the news cycle—and accessible via your mobile phone directly through their presence on Facebook. Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner, and others are now household names. Recent studies show that public trust in government is below 50 percent in the United States, with trust in the media at an all-time low. Perhaps with full correlation and causality, we also see that leaked information is globally viewed as more trustworthy than official company press statements by an almost 2:1 margin.¹

But viewing the collapse of trust purely through the lens of diplomacy or foreign policy misses the bigger picture as it relates to modern life.

We see countless examples of companies large and small skirting the edge of propriety regarding what they are collecting and archiving, what they are doing with our information, and what they are promoting or suppressing.

Amazon's home smart device, the Echo speaker powered by Alexa, was prominently featured in a high-profile Arkansas murder case in 2017, which hinged on Amazon divulging audio recordings that may or may not have been captured after the device was activated by its “wake” word. While Amazon assures us that the device doesn't capture ambient audio, the internet is filled with examples of accidental recordings (if you own an Echo, you've no doubt had this happen to you) as well as theoretical and actual examples of hacking the device to manipulate when it's activated.

Similarly, Google acknowledged in October 2017 that its Home Mini smart device was in fact listening and recording all ambient audio in some users’ homes twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week after a blogger from Android Police broke the story.² It has since been reported (by Google) that the glitch has been fixed and applied only to a limited number of early release beta products sent to reviewers.

Samsung famously warned users in 2015 that all spoken words, including “personal or other sensitive information,” in the presence of its smart televisions were being recorded and sent to third parties through its voice recognition capabilities. Worse, Samsung advised users that even if they opted out of its SmartTV voice recognition feature, ambient audio would still be captured.³

We can view any of these examples as cases where we should give the brand the benefit of the doubt. All have nondisclosure policies, all have security procedures in place to safeguard private information, and all are using unattributable data to improve their services.

And yet.

And yet it's easy to see how each of these examples, not to mention countless others, can be interpreted as individual bits of evidence that when all viewed together prove that these companies and other entities do not have our best interests at heart and are perfectly happy to capture our everyday conversations for the purposes of commercial exploitation or worse.

KEEPING UP IN AN AGE OF TECHNOLOGICAL ACCELERATION

Events and advances are simply moving too fast for us to keep up. Watching a Silicon Valley technology executive getting grilled by Congress is akin to watching a pith-helmeted explorer trying to explain the magic that is a flashlight to a group of elder paleolithic tribesmen. There is so little common understanding between them that a conversation—let alone an informed interrogation, replete with sensible follow-up questions—is virtually impossible. The goal of ethically or legislatively constraining technology seems unattainable, and as a result the trust gap grows wider.

The fundamental question—and problem—of our times has thus become: how do we make sense of the tensions between technology and culture and trust?

“There were a number of serious panics—serious issues—in the 2016 election,” Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept told the author in an interview on January 10, 2018. “Fraudulent news being published, hacking and distributing information that blurred the lines between activism and journalism or even state-sponsored activity. Technology has advanced to the point where people could do things like this. So our legal norms, our cultural norms, our legislation can't keep up with what's technologically possible. When we look at what's coming down the line, this crisis will escalate. I see no evidence that our norms are catching up. I think technology is starting to lap us. It's exceeding our ability to even keep up with what's going on.”

And yet when we look at the collapse of trust in the broader picture, from government to big business to technology companies and others, there is a hunger on our collective parts to be consumers of leaked information and violated privacy, regardless of our personal views on the ethics or legislative oversight we might or might not be able to develop to constrain it. In this case, the ubiquity of mobile technology plus a lack of trust plus the collapse of privacy equaled Wikileaks.

“The Iraq War in 2003 and the financial crisis in 2008 were two very serious blows to people's trust in their institutions—and journalists really failed in their jobs to shape information to put it in intelligible form for the public,” Hussain explains. “And there was a real hunger on the part of people who became disillusioned for the ‘real story’ without spin. Wikileaks seemed to satisfy that desire. There was a lot of good will towards them. Wikileaks is possible because of advances in information technology, but such an institution would never have come about if there weren't failures in our institutions that created a demand in the public for disintermediated information.”

How do we draw a draft conclusion at this point? We lack trust in the institutions around us, we realize that technology is moving faster than our ability to constrain it, but we're fascinated by all the truth we now have access to in this post-apocalyptic privacy landscape. So, we're OK with it. Are we?

THE LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PRIVACY AND TRUST

It's important to draw a thick line separating the ideas of “privacy” and “trust.” The same technology platforms that capture and disseminate hacked information in the lofty name of the public good are the ones that leak our own information into the hands of anyone willing to buy it wholesale. We trust these technology platforms; this point is unarguable, no matter what we say, in the sense that we willingly share every possible detail of our lives on them with the understanding that they're a means to an end. They're convenient ways of communicating and sharing our lives with our close network of friends, but when questioned, we readily acknowledge that these platforms are more than likely using these shared insights, photos, and comments in ways we don't necessarily like. In this instance, the fondness of sharing plus the instant endorphin rush of validation times the zero value of our concern for personal privacy (and our unwillingness to say no, despite the terms and con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Brian Solis
• INTRODUCTION: The Impact of Technology on Culture
• PART 1: The Rules
• PART 2: Synthesis
• PART 3: Implications
• PART 4: The Future
• CHAPTER NOTES
• INDEX
• About the Authors