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Imagine it Forward: Spot Market Trends to Shape the Future of Your Business, with Beth Comstock, Former Vice Chair, GE, and Author, Imagine It Forward
Live in the market
My job as a marketer became my passion and my calling card in the sense that I decided—I didn’t come with a pure marketing background, I had a lot to learn and discover in marketing—but as I started to get out and discover, take that natural curiosity, to me marketing’s role became about taking the name seriously: live in the market. Marketing is about the market. It’s about where is the world going, what are the trends. When you look at it that way, suddenly marketing is about change, it’s about innovation. It’s about helping your customers, not just your company, figure out what’s next.
So my mission and the colleagues I had in marketing, in a company that largely hadn’t really had marketing, we said there’s an opportunity to bring marketing to the beginning of the process. Make us about the market. Have us help you figure out—almost be like the GPS of the organization—where the world is going. What are the insights? What do customers find valuable? Not just what we tell them they want to buy, but what do they want to buy? And yeah, we’ll do the things you traditionally imagine of marketing—we’ll tell stories, we’ll do ads, we’ll do brochures and trade shows—but why just save us for the end when we can be so much more valuable understanding where the market’s going. I think that really helped us differentiate ourselves.
Make room for discovery
To me, discovery is just using your curiosity to get out and spot trends and patterns and start to think about how they may be shaping the future of you and your team and your business. I believe every person—certainly every business—needs to make room for discovery. I think there’s a practice of doing it, and too often we delegate it. It’s the insights team, or we hire a consultant, because that’s what they do. And yes, those roles are helpful, but I think everybody needs to be aware of what’s new and next.
I use a really simple pattern recognition tool for myself, and it’s called “Going on Threes”. It’s not scientific, but I’ve found it very effective. Again, you’re out discovering. You have a hunch. There’s something interesting, you want to go to a space, and you see it once and you say, “That’s interesting.” Second time I say, “Wow, that’s a coincidence. I’ve seen that now twice in two different settings.” Third time I say, “There’s a trend.” And I just declare it’s a trend. Let me figure out how we can bring it back into my organization.
I’ll give you an example. For GE, we were looking at how we think about manufacturing and the future of manufacturing. We went and just started looking at people who were doing things on the fringe of manufacturing. It took us to hacker spaces. We went to a hacker space in Brooklyn, where we saw people making small gas turbines and water purification and solar panels for their houses. And you start to see, wow, there’s a trend building here of people making really sophisticated equipment using all kinds of interesting parts. So you bring that back and say, is there a way we can start working more with open source communities of people who are engineers by day in a company, and on the weekends they’re building something new? Can we start to experiment with that? That’s how discovery leads to pattern recognition leads to translating it and taking action.
Bring in sparks
To me, a spark is a provocateur from outside your organization who you bring in to really agitate—certainly with an idea and hopefully for bigger change. Why I like sparks is because they don’t work for you, so they’re not afraid of offending you. Certainly consultants can play this role, but I’m talking about bringing in an expert who knows what they’re talking about and wants to challenge the incumbent view.
I’ll give you an example. I remember very vividly in the early days of blockchain, bitcoin putting together a dinner with some of the very early pioneers of cryptocurrency. I convened the CEO of our company, people out of our financial services, our CFO, and people who were looking at industry. These were early pioneers who to our people seemed so far out there that they could never possibly—why would we care about cryptocurrency? Why do we care? And the people were definitely “weird” in the sense that they weren’t like a traditional GE person. But by the end of the evening, by hearing what these people had to say—by using them as a spark—they got our people to think differently about things like, hey, blockchain technology can open up our financial ledgers, potentially could be a disruptor for the way we do accounting in the accounting industry. Even more specifically, we could use that technology—as we’re having machines talk to machines in a digital age—to much more clearly do transactions.
So, sparks at first seem weird. Or they seem like, yeah, they’re good, but they don’t know us. I think part of your role as a changemaker in an organization is to translate those two perspectives, because a spark doesn’t talk your language and is often misunderstood. I often find I would, in the early days of a B2B company, I often would bring in a consumer example. I would get so frustrated because the team would say, yeah, that’s consumer and we’re B2B. I’d get angry, and be like, they just don’t get it, do they? I realized I had to translate that. So it meant that with a spark I’d have to spend some time up front saying, okay, this is a consumer example. Let’s try to come up with metaphors about how it works on the business side. Sparks can provoke, but you also have to create that translation function so they don’t get lost in translation.