Who Stole My Cheese

What goes on in a marketers mind as he or she considers a product? The idea for this newsletter came to me unexpectedly, my wife, as some of you know, has breast cancer and her diet is limited to “white products: “ white sugar, white flour, white cheese, white fats, white meats and, of course, white rice.

Unlike some men, I like to shop for food. I fancy myself as someone who is adequately knowledgeable about food, food science; nutrition, food marketing and consumer trends and I go about my selection process in a traditional way. At home and before leaving for the store, I make a list of products categories - produce, meats, dairy, etc. and underneath each category I specify both branded and unbranded food items – paper towels, Downey etc. Then, I go to the isle or section of the store where they are presented and consider the branded and unbranded alternatives before making a buying decision. I’m influenced by both rational and emotional motivators. Price is a factor but not the only factor in my decision making and since I follow a decidedly Socratic method and I do talk quietly to myself much to the consternation of many of my fellow shoppers before making a purchase decision: I openly challenge my own thinking and choices in the store and will eliminate items at the checkout counter if I’m still sitting on the fence.

Since I’ve been doing the shopping, I feel qualified to make a few observations: first, most of what food manufacturers call innovation is incredibly complicated and confusing and does not lead you easily to good food. Second, most so-called insights are nothing more than highlighted points along a tangent that are not the results or products of nature but of food science. Many of these innovative claims are packaged with health claims that should be our first clue that what’s inside is anything by healthy. Food has been replaced by nutrients and common sense by confusion. Many food innovations are edible foodlike substances offered in odd shapes, colors and has failed to make us healthier, although it has made us fatter and sicker while ruining thousands of really good meals.

One of my major discoveries is health claims. When a health claim is made it is best to remember that what you’re about to buy and eat is not food. That is it is not the kind of food my Irish grandmother or my Italian grandmother would recognize as food, and if they would be confused by reading the side panels, they wouldn’t eat it, and neither should you. Here’s another point. For centuries mankind navigated the question of “what’s to eat” without expert advice, so when reading the ingredients list and you need a food science degree to understand it, don’t buy it. Instead, buy something really novel: something that’s well grown, unprocessed and god-forbid, real.

So here I am on Friday in my local grocery store to buy a box of Marconi and Cheese. I find no fewer than five different offerings including my all-time childhood favorite, Kraft Marconi and Cheese. I think this was going to be an easy decision, until I read the label and to my astonishment I found that there’s no cheese in Kraft Marconi and Cheese.

How could that be? Who stole my cheese?

For most of the last fifty years (of my life) Kraft Foods was one of America’s most trusted food manufacturers with highly familiar, All-American foods like Philadelphia brand Cream Cheese, and the ever popular Marconi and Cheese, and they were well regarded. Although they had many issues at work – they were once owed by a tobacco company – they apparently had more substantive issues: somehow the nutrition scientists and food marketers at Kraft took the cheese out of Marconi and Cheese, and were still able to call it Marconi and Cheese.

How did that happen? Who stole my cheese?

Uncharitably, you could say they were greedy and figured out a way to increase shareholder value by focusing on the institutional imperatives of the food industry and the innovations of nutrition science and the needless complications around eating that leverage consumers peccadilloes that eating something warm that you can make in minutes is better than eating something warm that you can also make in a few more minutes but with good, real ingredients is maybe not better for you but just as good. Charitably, you could say the pressures to grow and increase profitability and shareholder value were great. All I know is they took something real out of Marconi and Cheese and replaced it with some foodlike substance.

Which leads me to my question about marketing innovation: a product is innovative not only when it is different and relevant to the people who are buying it to solve a problem but it also helps them live better lives. Despite our daunting dietary landscape and the incredible pressures on food manufacturers and the chronic diseases that our diets cause, we need to change not only what we eat but how we eat.

The most pressing problems people have, which by the way the best products solve for, are simpler than the answers that are provided. What will allow companies to prosper is the essence of marketing and innovation, which can be summed up in a simple answer to a simple question: how to you help people live better lives?

To do this you never lose sight on what make you great in the first place. You don’t take the cheese out of your Marconi and Cheese. You find the “sweet spot” between making a product, market and corporate difference to your customers and remain relevant to them. You also don” fall victim to strategies that focus on demographics, images and media-focused communications. Instead, focus on the essence of marketing, which simply finding ways to help people solve problems and live better, happier lives.

Here are six things I think you can do to add difference and relevance to your company and product lines in 2009:

• Understand people as people, and create conversations with them instead of talking at them.
• Focus on solving problems and adding value.
• Satisfy real consumer needs versus polishing your brand images.
• Keep your design simple.
• Create better lives for real people in the real world, and not just in television commercials.
• Not only provide value to the brand, but also making people feel valued.

CANCER
They say that cancer changes you and they may be right. Six months ago my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. When I found out about her diagnosis, I became immersed in the literature and science of cancer.

I did not become an authority who lurked around the hallways of the hospital challenging the thinking of every doctor and specialist who examined and cared for Kathy, but I learned enough to be “fairly aggressive” in my discussions to know the difference between a mystifying oncological answer and the one that merited reasonable consideration.

I am a little leery about the language doctors used to describe treatment options as being too colloquial, such as the title on the pamphlet, “Chemotherapy and You,” thinking that every man, woman and child I saw in the infusion unit of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) preferred it to be “Chemotherapy and Someone Else,” and the seemingly unfriendly names given to the dozens of poisons cancer patients get pumped into their veins. Unlike other hospitals in the Boston area, MGH did not favor the habit of writing up “patient-friendly” biographies of their medical staff that listed their hobbies, and that was fine with me. I wanted delusion; I wanted to think that every waking moment Kathy’s medical team was focusing on curing her cancer, particularly the “triple negative” cell type cancer that was indicated on her pathology report.

In the midst of all this, I maintained my sense of humor because I had a dim idea of what I was doing. I wanted my wife to be someone, a recognizable person, a full-blooded memorable human being, not just a cancer patient. She had already lost the person she used to be, that healthy, athletic 57-year old woman, and I wasn’t going to let her lose more.

Some friends, who were also facing the rigors of breast cancer, had their own spins claiming individuality in the cancer world. One friend questioned every medical decision that was being made. Another, terrorized technicians with edicts like, “This is my cancer. You get one chance to stick me. You can’t do right the first time, find me somebody who can.”

The way I see it, cancer is like a great permission. It’s alright for a threatened person to be romantic, even crazy, if they feel like it. All your life you think you have to hold back your craziness, but when you’re sick you can let it go in all its vivid wildness.

That’s not exactly how Kathy experienced her cancer. She never needed cancer to get in touch with her inner wild. What she experienced was a painfully stark clarity about what was important and what was not. It was as if, she sometimes wondered if she had spent most of her life asleep. But now, she was awake.

As Kathy’s treatments wore on through all the surgeries, chemotherapy, the anti-nausea drugs, the baldness, the fatigue, her spirits sometimes waned. One morning in particular she wandered out of the bathroom, her eyes filled with tears, she walked across the room and wondered aloud where had the attractive, vibrant woman she saw in the mirror every morning gone. She huddled into her chair feeling empty and spent and very old.

Thursday was Kathy’s last chemotherapy treatment – sixteen weeks, one treatment every two weeks. Her oncologist told her the period between chemotherapy and radiation, and radiation and the rest of your life, is known as adaption. What she didn’t tell her was how, after being poisoned for four months and having part of your body removed before being zapped for six weeks by a machine that looks like it came out of NASA, you are supposed to live.

If Kathy had asked, she may have been told that she could lead a normal life – working, taking walks, exercising, traveling…enjoying life. Anything, really.

What no one ever addresses is what is normal after having completely lost yourself into the “world of cancer,” as my friend Michael calls it, someone needs to tell you, who am I now? Kathy never asked that question. Probably because everyone has to answer that question for themselves, just as we all have to answer it whether we have cancer or not.

Steady Calm Go

During his early rein at IBM, Lou Gerstner proclaimed, “you don’t launch new products, you let them escape from the building.” The inference to his product line managers was decisions must be made quickly, that having a bias for action leads to better results.

As in every place, ecology is determined by atmosphere. In Gerstner’s time at IBM, and to a greater degree today, transactional line management has replaced not only diagnosticians, but also comprehensive diagnosticians. Often whatever lies beneath the surface, is operating beneath the level of our frenzied, transactional radar. Unlike Gerstner’s directive, the last thing senior management should want is a line manager who says, “There is absolutely nothing wrong with our plans.” What line managers try to establish to senior management’s comfort, the customer’s comfort, is that what you are about to fund and what you are about to buy is as good as it can be, right now and for the next few months.

A line managers “steady calm” should be apparent to a senior manager. If a manager is distracted, frequently interrupted by other transactional “fire drills” as they make new product development decisions – pricing, positioning, distribution, etc. – the steady flow of her thinking may be diverted in the wrong direction. There is a similar cause for concern if the line manager seems rushed or breaks in as questions are being answered, so that you feel that she is not letting you tell her everything about the product, market or customer. Being quick and shooting from the hip are indications of anchoring and availability. They are the two most frequent cognitive biases in transactional thinking, and often they are all a seasoned professional needs to hit the mark and make a correct decision and recommend an effective strategic plan. But, with the absence of many seasoned and experience senior managers, transactional thinking can veer wide of the mark.

Many transactional manager miss their marks because of the use of the heuristic called “availability.” In 2002 Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem won the Nobel Prize in economics for work illuminating the way certain patterns of thinking cause irrational decisions in the marketplace.

“Availability” means the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind. In any environment, there’s ecology. For example, large numbers of young people in our country who are drawn to white flour, fat and sugar populate many urban and suburban environments, and over the course of a week ten young people may walk into local convenience store and purchase an item that has some combination of all three ingredients. The local store owner will tend to judge it as highly likely that the eleventh young person walking in the door looking for “something to eat” has white flour, sugar and fat on their minds because it readily comes to mind, although in a convenience store there is a long list of food and specialty items to quell a young appetite. But white sugar, flour and fat is the most available hypothesis based on his most recent experience.

This is what is called, “distorted pattern recognition” caused by the background ecology. Instead of integrating all the key information, the store clerk cherry-picks only a few features of the young person’s needs: hunger, rapid movement, perhaps little cash. He will rationalize the contradictory data – perhaps, a sticker or lapel pin for “saving the planet” – as simply reflecting a clothing choice and nothing more. In fact, this discrepancy should have signaled that his hypothesis might be wrong.

Such cognitive cherry-picking is termed “confirmation bias.” The fallacy, confirming what you expect to find by selectively accepting or ignoring information, follows what Kahneman referred to as “anchoring.” Anchoring is a shortcut in the thinking where a person doesn’t consider multiple possibilities but quickly and firmly latches on to a signal one, sure that he has thrown his anchor down right where he needs to be. You look at your map but your mind plays a trick on you – confirmation bias – because you see only the landmarks you expect to see and neglect all the other information that should tell you that in fact you are still at sea. Your skewed reading of the map “confirms” your mistaken assumption that you have reached your destination.

Affective errors resembles confirmation bias in selectively surveying the data, the former is driven by a wish for a certain outcome, the latter driven by the expectation that your initial assessment was right, even it was bad for “the product or the plan”.

Probably one of the best safeguards against this is to always hold back, to make sure that even when you think you have the answer, to generate a short list of alternatives. It’s also better to work with a “studied calm”, consciously slowing your thinking and actions with each decision in order not to be distracted or pressed by the hectic and sometimes chaotic, transactional atmosphere where products “escape from the building.”

It’s also fair to ask, “What is the worst thing that can happen?” That question is not a sign of “flip-flopping” or hedging your bets; in fact, the best trained new product development managers and directors keep it in mind with each new product they launch. But it can easily slip from the forefront of thinking in the intense environment of transactional management. By asking that question you can slow down your pace and help yourself think more broadly. You can prompt yourself and others to consider lifting your anchor from the most available harbor. You might even cause a rare seasoned manager who is acting out of pique, to stop in his tracks and revert to stop acting out and regain his professional thinking.

TALKING

I’m not a statesman, or politician, or business leader, and even as a citizen, consumer and business owner I’m a mere beginner. Yet I am a critic and being immersed, like all of you, in a critically ill economy, I thought I might accept the pun and turn it on our condition. My initial experience of this economy was a series of disconnected shocks, and my first instinct was to try to bring it under control by turning it to narrative. Always in emergencies we invent narratives. We describe what is happening, as if to confine the catastrophe. When people heard that the “credit crisis” was spinning out of control, writers and pundits inundated us with stories and cases of other people and other organizations in crisis, but for some reason, few have ever told us how the crisis affects them. Storytelling seems to be a natural reaction to crisis. People bleed stories and we have become a blood bank of them.

A person or an organization has to start by treating the crisis not as a disaster, an occasion for depression or panic; but as a narrative, a story. Stories are antibodies against crisis and pain. When various individuals and organizations file for bankruptcy, or when organizations displace employees into joblessness, I’ve found it helps a lot when you can create a narrative of what is happening to you. Talking has a way of humanizing and translating experience. It can prepare, strengthen and sometimes, even console you. Anything is better than an awful silent suffering.

I sometimes think that silence can kill you, like the terrible scene at the end of Kafka’s, The Trial when Joseph K, lies speechlessly, “like a dog.” To die, or to feel dead is to be no longer human, to be dehumanized – and I think that language, speech, stories or narratives are the most effective ways to keep our humanity alive. To remain silent is literally to close down the shop on one’s humanity.

I knew a man who had lung cancer, and during his final days, he was speechless. For days, he lay in his bed trying to talk to the people with his eyes. He was too depressed or maybe traumatized to try to write on a pad. He died not of cancer exactly, but of pneumonia, as if his lungs had filled with trapped speech and he drowned in it.

Some of the best writers of our time turn their anxieties and neuroses into a story in order to be able to control it to a degree, so a person in crisis, or on the wrong side of the credit crunch or a job loss can make a story, a narrative, out of their ordeal as a way of trying to detoxify it.
One of the many ways you might do this is to create mini-narratives. Metaphor is a powerful ally. You might, for example, see your predicament as a visit to a disturbed country, rather like Georgia. Or, perhaps it is a love affair with a demented other who demands things you have never done before. Or, as a presentation you’re about to give to a full conference room on a subject that has not been specified.

Making narratives can rescue you from the unknown, from what Becker calls, “the panic inherent in creation” or “the suction of infinity.” Thinking about difficult situations is what writers do best. And we should all be writers, if only for the thinking and the way language can help us write our way out of a difficult situation.

Blame

The job of trying to find meaning out of any series of events that are happening to you, or your business, or even to someone you know, or care about is the job of trying to put the pieces together, trying to make sense out of things and requires you to be receptive, even somewhat passive. You have to wait for the events to come to you, keep an open mind, and be prepared to find the unexpected in unexpected places. At the same time, it also helps to be actively looking for certain kinds of clues and reasons. While the purpose of understanding is to sweep up all the fragments and get underneath all the facts and illuminate and sharpen their meaning. It is also to impose and exclude other elements, whose relevance most often depends on their originality. Nevertheless, in the course of collecting data, connections emerge. Certain ideas are simply out there at any time, part of the collective consciousness that people in groups and organizations tap into, knowingly or not.

One trend I have found to be prevalent among my clients of late is when they are encountering a difficult situation was the frequent use of blaming.

Focusing on blame is bad idea not because it can harm or injure relationships, cause pain or anxiety. Blame is a bad idea because it inhibits our ability to learn from what’s really causing the problem and to do anything meaningful to correct it. The urge to blame is based, quite literally, on the fear of being blamed. Too often, blaming also serves as a bad proxy for taking directly about what’s causing the pain.

Blame is about judging and looking backwards. When blame is in play, you can expect defensiveness, strong emotions and arguments about what a “good boss,” “competent employee,” or any “reasonable person” should or shouldn’t do. When we blame someone, we are offering them the role of the accused and accusers do what accusers always do: they accuse more, raising the ante with every word.

“Don’t blame,” however is not the answer. You can’t move away from blame until you understand what blame is, what motivates you to want to blame and accuse another person for your current or past situation, and how to move to something else that will better serve you.

That something else is contribution. The question to be asked, and answered for each person, is “how did we each contribute to bringing about the current situation or what did us each do or not do to get into this mess.”

As a rule, when things go wrong in human relationships, everyone has contributed in some important ways. A common distortion is to see contribution as singular – that what has gone wrong is either entirely our fault or (more often) entirely theirs. Except in extreme cases of child abuse, almost every situation that gives rise to a conversation is the result of a joint contribution system. Focusing on only one or the other of the contributors obscures rather than illuminates.