I like bees – especially bumblebees.
Did you know there are about 250 species of bumblebee worldwide? They are social insects, not given to solitary pursuits except when it comes to foraging for food – flower nectar and pollen. The hair on their legs is ideally suited to capturing pollen, in turn enabling them to pollinate flowers as they travel from one to the next. And travel they do!
They’ll travel up to 2 miles to find especially intriguing flowers (experiments show they are attracted to particular shapes, colors and fragrances). They don’t fly in straight lines nor in any predictable order. If a particular flower catches their attention, off they go. At speeds of up to 30 mph. It is this frenzied, random activity that is so well captured in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee.
Sometimes the bumblebee comes to mind when I’m asked to review an organization’s marketing. That I’m asked at all usually indicates that either the engine is not firing on all cylinders, or that someone – often the CEO – is not at peace with the way things are working.
When I show up, before delving head-first into specifics it’s helpful to get the lay of the land – some perspective and context-setting on the organization and its approach to marketing. Sometimes I get a crisp synopsis of the marketing plan. Often I’ll receive a general outline with an admitted aside that the plan needs updating. And sometimes (more often than you might think) I hear the buzzing of the bumblebee ….
Like the flight of the bee – never in a straight line, moving unpredictability from one flower to the next – l am told of a strategy that is agile, fluid, dynamic, continually reinvented. Like fingerprints, no two weeks of marketing are the same. The teller is filled with pride that as many balls stay aloft in the air as they do. I hear a different story. Chaos in search of calm. The entropy of the universe retreating into its own black hole. Carpe diem! served up like a rich, hot and frothy latte.
I typically learn that the organization has nothing resembling a written plan, and that its marketing department operates like the NORAD Centre at Cheyenne Mountain, ready to spring into action when the alarm sounds. (I once had an executive tell me that the market was evolving so quickly that a plan would be obsolete before it was finished. I asked if his people just did whatever they wanted when they came to work. He said no, giving detailed examples of their roles. I offered that if that was the case then he indeed did have a plan – just one that was in his head. I got one of those, Yeah, well, duh!, looks and decided to move on.)
In such situations the strategy is starkly clear: approach it one day at a time, with Bobby Fisher deciding every move. Everything is built for tactical swiftness, game score is kept (but usually not the win-loss record) with nothing glued or fastened. As the briefing goes on I often find myself shifting metaphorically from the bumblebee to the caffeine-addicted gamer, reacting to obstacles and threats through lightning-quick reflexes and by blasting the whatever out of his opponent. Should I get to meet some marketing staff I find they fit one of two molds: the highly creative and adrenaline-fueled who yearn for the eleventh hour, and the reserved I’ll-just-do-what-I’m-asked-because-it-pays-well who have built up an immunity to their surroundings.
These are tough assignments – usually because any attempt to change the status quo is off-limits, and earns a look to suggest my sanity is in serious doubt whenever I raise it.
What’s particularly fascinating to me may surprise you: a strategy like this often achieves great results – certainly in the early going. But – and here’s the ‘gotcha’ part … the reason I’m blogging about this – I don’t see it work well as organizations get larger. It breaks down fast. It doesn’t scale. When an organization gets to a certain size (this varies) the seams starts coming undone. What may have only needed a day to work its magic before now stretches out to weeks. When the boss is absent the team, unsure how to respond to unexpected market changes, doubles down on what they were last told to do.
No! This is decidedly not how Steve Jobs operates (I do get this come-back). Mr. Jobs may be in complete control of Apple’s marketing, but Apple is well-operationalized for speed and scale, and the marketing strategy is well-codified, communciated and reinforced across the company. It is anything but a strategy du jour.
Transitioning from small to big can be challenging, to be sure. But it need not imply a loss of either control or agility. There are numerous examples of Fortune 1000 companies that not only market well, but are geared to respond swiftly and vigorously. Apple. P&G. Clorox. Google. They can do what their smaller rivals do and yet stay ahead of them.
Mimicking the bumblebee can be a great way to start a business, but it’s no way to grow one.
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