A terrific article by Roger Martin, “Building Better Decision Makers: The 3D MBA”, crystallizes some of the challenges of advertising/marketing in the digital age. Martin argues that the business school’s original focus on decision-making (and expediency) has caused MBA-thinking to be shallow, narrow, and static. In particular, he highlights the over-dependence on models that MBAs have: people in business will focus on how to choose between models rather than coming up with new ones to meet new circumstances.
I was most intrigued by the graphic that he provided to illustrate the notion of 1D versus 3D MBAs. It’s a cube with three axes: static vs dynamic; shallow vs deep; narrow vs broad.
This applies really well to the advertising/:30 centricity of a lot of brand thinking. For decades, advertising, particularly the :30, has been our most powerful tool for communicating, defining, and shaping consumer perceptions of brand. Due to its very nature, however, this puts brand thinking in the static/narrow/shallow space. Think about it:
Narrow — because we’re buying customer’s attention, we can only pick one thing to talk about, the unique selling proposition, the single most important thing, the one human truth, the one insight. With only :30, we can’t talk about much, so we must be narrow in order to do do it well.
Shallow — again because of limited time, advertisers have to find the most efficient way to have an impact. :30 doesn’t allow you to make an argument, do a meaningful comparison, explain how great an offering you have. Instead, :30 forces you to quickly try and hit a memorable emotional note. A truncated version of the pre-TV “salesmanship in print” formulation, :30 thinking is closer to ringing Pavlov’s bell.
Static — this is partly the production nature of :30 and print, but it goes deeper. Not only are you unable to have a TV spot or advertisement dynamically adjust to a situation, but its focus on big ideas, stories, and belief in the power of repetition make :30s a relatively unchanging communication monolith. Pick your favorite spots and see how much variability you find — even the super-awesome Old Spice guy’s twitter responses came down to variations on a very funny, very entertaining, but very singular theme.
So, cribbing Martin’s visualization of the three dimensions of business problems to explore marketing, you have a brand space that is broad, deep, and dynamic, largely defined by :30 thinking which must be narrow, shallow, and static.
This is a rich vein Martin has identified. Digital technologies, communications, and interactivity make it possible for communications and activities to go as broad and deep as users want to go. If the content is provided by institutions, users will deepen and broaden it themselves. The web is inherently dynamic through hyperlinking but various technologies make these situations even more dynamic by inviting interaction, invoking personalization algorithms.
Brands are 3D. People live their lives in 3D. Advertisement is 1D. :30 thinking is 1D. When :30 thinking drives everything in the brand space, there’s a lot of lost potential.