the crazy age
DESCRIPTION
To capture that unique blend of fear and excitement, of bewilderment and complexity, of opportunity and threat, of intensity and unpredictability, only The Crazy Age will do.Welcome, then, to The Crazy Age – where the only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty and the only thing we can be sure of is that everything is about to change.TRANSCRIPT
www.beThehurriCane.Com
welCome
To The
Crazy
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As always, the answer depends on your perspective. There is more than enough happening in the world to fuel a fearful and pessimistic outlook, whilst those of a more optimistic bent will need little encouragement to wax lyrical about the unprecedented new
opportunities opening up before us. What you will struggle to find, however, are those who continue to insist that it’s business as usual.
This is probably the most telling characteristic of our times; whether we identify with the gloomiest doomsayers or the most starry-eyed visionaries, we agree unanimously on one central idea – everything is changing. We are also in agreement about the nature of these changes – that they are happening, that they are irreversible
and their effects will definitely be unpredictable and possibly unimaginably far-reaching. The Chinese used to curse people by saying they hoped they would live through interesting times. Well, our times are certainly that. When it comes to capturing the
sheer intensity of the changes we are living through, however, The Interesting Age lacks a certain oomph. To capture that unique blend of fear and excitement, of bewilderment and complexity, of opportunity and threat, of intensity and unpredictability, only The Crazy age will do.
Welcome, then, to The Crazy age – where the only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty and the only thing we can be sure of is that everything is about to change.
Taking unCerTainTy granTed
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How best to describe the times we’re living through?
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Ch-Ch-Ch-ChangesChange in The Crazy age is utterly pervasive and astonishingly varied. Raise the subject with people and the sheer diversity of responses you will hear is astounding. They will range over topics as diverse as the credit crunch and melting polar ice caps, the rise of Google and the demise of General Motors, The X-Factor and TED, religious fundamentalism and genetic engineering, iPhones and Barack Obama.
Those with an eye for politics might mention the rise of China or the coalition of our new government; music fans will talk about the collapse of the record industry, the ascendance of iTunes and the ethics of illegal downloading; social media evangelists will insist the old world of fixed, top-down communication is being rendered irrelevant in the face of relentless communication between global communities of customers; the environmentalist brigade will keep you up all night worrying; technology buffs and the twittering classes will just keep you up all night.
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This last group will have a lot to tell us, because technology is the driving force behind a lot of these changes. In fact, it is in the technological arena that we experience the effects of change most immediately and powerfully. Technology embodies all the main characteristics of change in The Crazy age – its radical unpredictability, its paradigm-shifting effects and its ever-accelerating intensity.
Consider the following events – the evolution of language, the invention of writing, the invention of the printing
press, the development of the personal computer, the emergence of the internet, the arrival of the worldwide web, the rise of Google, the launch of Facebook, the moment when Facebook overtook Google as the most popular destination for US web traffic.
Some of these may strike you as more significant than others. No matter. What is truly striking about this list is the incredible shrinking of time between genuinely significant events – from thousands of years to a few thousand days. Far from reaching some kind of peak
or “End Of History” as was being prophesied so glibly only twenty years ago, the pace of change is actually accelerating. Change has gone beyond being an inevitability – change has become the norm.
honey, i shrunk
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Where does this maelstrom of change leave those operating in the worlds of business, marketing and communications? Again, it dependson how you choose to navigate the storm. For those who have enjoyed previously unassailable positions of dominance, the winds of change can be chilling – with those who resist or ignore them in grave danger of being swept away. But – in yet another paradox of The Crazy age – this relentless process of change creates as much opportunity as it does threat.
In particular, it creates opportunities for those who would previously have been hopelessly outgunned by much larger and more powerful rivals. New markets can be created much more quickly and new communities of customers can be energised by new ideas almost overnight. Whilst it’s true that fresh ideas and great word of mouth have always characterised successful new businesses, what’s unique now is the extent to which technological advances make it not only possible to quantify these assets, it can enable them to be amplified to the point where they can overturn entire categories.
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gorillasvs.
guerillasThis unprecedented state of affairs creates a new paradigm for business communications, where constant innovation and customer engagement has become more than a canny strategy for ambitious, upwardly mobile companies - it has become an absolute necessity for survival.
A relatively stable and predictable world where market leaders enjoyed economies-of-scale-der ived dominance over smaller, copycat rivals is giving way to a more unpredictable environment where dominant market “gorillas” are increasingly vulnerable to the guerrilla strategies of nimbler, more creative opponents.
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As they have sought to exploit the vulnerabilities of market leaders, these maverick competitors have evolved a series of distinctive styles, methods and approaches. Recognisable techniques include trailblazing product redefinitions or innovations (e.g. Apple) radical improvements in customer service (First Direct); creating radically new
levels of audience participation and community empowerment (reality TV, Barack Obama’s election campaign) all-out assaults on the credibility and integrity of the market leader (Virgin vs. BA, Ryanair) influencing or trading on customers’ social, ethical and political attitudes (The Body Shop, Fairtrade, Innocent, The Co-op) or opening up entirely new markets for products (Nintendo Wii, Apple iPad).
That the gorillas themselves are adopting the same approaches to either defend their territory or enter new markets themselves (Project Natal, Bing) might be ironic, but it is also testament to their efficacy.
And whilst some of these strategies are hardly new, what is new is the extent to which their effects can be amplified via word-of-mouth on the internet and within social networks into forces which can overturn market conventions and reconfigure customers’ ideas and expectations, in the process putting much larger and better-resourced opponents on the back foot – and sometimes even flat on their backs.
spoTTing The maveriCks
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leT’s goHunter S. Thompson wrote “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” – a prophetic line that rings truer than ever in The Crazy age. Crazy is the new black; success in this world is no longer about shying away from the bizarre, the unpredictable and the wildly unconventional, but about embracing it and actively seeking it out. Everywhere we look, we see crazy thinking re-energising previously mainstream, conventional brands. Guinness make a virtue out of the fact their pints take an age to settle, Marmite celebrates the fact that many people hate it and Yorkie thrive in the chocolate market by telling us their product is not for girls.
All of these approaches fly in the face of conventional marketing thinking, yet their success reveals that this unconventionality is in fact their greatest strength. By taking a crazier route than their rivals, they have succeeded in outwitting them and carving out unique and distinctive territories for themselves.
In The Crazy age, this may ultimately be the only sane thing to do - to buck convention, to defy expectation, to be predictably unpredictable. To stop asking ourselves if we’re being crazy and ask ourselves if we’re being crazy enough. Are you?
Crazy
The Crazy
age
To get your head around
The Crazy
age, come se
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