Tomorrows brands can’t succeed with yesterday’s leadership

Last week I attended the Forrester Marketing Forum in San Francisco.  I will be publishing a series of blogs with the insights I was exposed to during this fantastic two day event.  If you haven’t been to one of these, I highly recommend it.

During Chris Stutzman’s presentation, he laid out this quote:

Tomorrows brands can’t succeed with yesterday’s leadership.

Hell, yes.  This captures in one sentence what I’ve been trying to say for quite some time.  It’s why I went two weeks ago and spoke to students at SCAD about how marketers today need to think and act like entrepreneurs.  It’s the premise for most of my talks with marketers, urging them to transform their companies to be able to embrace emerging technology.  Concepts like failing fast, which I heard at this conference in many of the talks, have been tried and true in the startup world and are just now being considered in corporate America.

Forrester has an acronym for the 5 habits that marketing should embrace.  It’s called ADAPT.

• Accept change
• Dare the status quo
• Act continuously
• Participate personally
• Tear down boundaries

I love ADAPT.  Particularly the P, as I can’t tell you how many times I sit with a marketer and find out they’ve never checked-in anywhere, never bought a tractor in Farmville, and never taken a photo with Instagram.  Oh yeah, I’ve done the Farmville thing, and after experiencing it so I understood why it was so popular, I quit in dramatic fashion :)

In fact, I wrote a post over a year ago titled, “In digital marketing, there’s no substitute for experience“.  There’s just not.

So kudos to Forrester for this concept.  I’ll certainly be using ADAPT or at least components of it going forward.