PvT: Okay. Talk a little bit about digital asset management and whether or not that’s a feasible way for global organizations to manage their corporate brand identities, photos, and videos—their brand assets?

MM: Sure. Well, just for a little bit of a history on that. My firm invented the term “media asset management” in 1994 in our work with Aldus and MediaStation.

Later in 1996 or so, we expanded the term when we wrote the white paper for Apple Computer as part of their Masters of Media Program—a brilliant industry-wide marketing framework that included Adobe, Agfa, Kodak, Quark, and Xerox conceived and executed by Jeff Martin, then the Director of Marketing for their Advertising, Design, New Media, and Publishing division.

Apple commissioned an executive white paper to make the business case for their line of Apple servers. IBM picked up from there and commissioned another white paper and international roadshow—also to make the case for the IBM Content Manager.

In 1998, my partners and I wrote the first full market report on DAM and continued with the reports until 2002.

In 2001, we began our long-standing partnership with Henry Stewart Events and their DAM Symposium.

In 2003, as the Editor in Chief, I started the Journal of Digital Asset Management—with which I continue today.

Strategic Capability

I say this all as preamble, do I consider digital asset management strategic capability? The short answer is, emphatically, yes. You can’t manage a global brand and a pan-regional marketing operations without some form of DAM. In fact, we have published a series of executive white papers on the subject.

Now DAM has a lot of misinterpretations, or misunderstandings in terms of what it constitutes.

DAM, first and foremost, constitutes business strategy for accelerating operational processes within media, entertainment, and publishing, and marketing content processes within global brands. So it’s reducing cycle time, reducing cost, and having a process that’s far more agile or flexible in adapting to change.

I contrast digital asset management with content management. I used to say somewhat tongue in cheek that content management is really ‘crap management’.

Content management deals with more or less self-descriptive files—documents or Web pages for which you do not need a lot metadata to describe its contents, meanings, semantics associations with other content and, more specifically, who owns the content or images—from where did the editorial or copywritten material come, when does it expire, all that.

Digital asset management, in contrast, deal with non-descriptive files, hence the emphasis on metadata and the systematic reuse and transformation of preexisting digital media files. This entails the creation and management of metadata associated with findability, reuse standards, and permissions or digital rights management.

Now a reusable digital file may represent an image, photograph, or publishing template. Digital assets may include text or product claims used in marketing communications, or video clips, MP3 podcasts, and type fonts, or Flash animation. Or elements that contribute to immersive virtual world experiences 3D and 2D models or primitives.

A digital asset might also include software code assets—scripts and programming—and things like IT service management policies and business rules or software libraries and software objects. Or learning objects or reusable pieces curricula that flow into books, instructional DVDs, or online courseware.

So, digital asset management is really about reuse and creating metadata that give you competitive advantage: Cost reduction, time to market, higher quality, greater process agility, and the ability to maintain transparency or governance across an entire marketing supply chain.

As a business strategy, digital asset management starts with a DAM repository—where you put all those bits—and begins to really payoff with an operational group—a DAM service group—that maintains the integrity of metadata, digital asset files, and user productivity.

This brings us to the current state of the art in DAM:  Managing a supply chain for continuous improvement and reduction of cost, cycle time, defects, and opacity of key business processes.

So, I do not consider digital asset management an option, nor a luxury. Just like you have an email system, you must have a DAM. It’s just not an option.

PvT: And from your point-of-view, how will marketing’s contribution to the organization evolve?

MM: Marketing is really about what I’ll now call engagement with customers and stakeholders that affect the purchase, consideration, trial, and ultimately loyalty and advocacy of customers.

Marketing remains core, fundamental to the value and purpose of a company. However, marketing must evolve beyond messaging—you know the old saw, lipstick on pigs.

Unfortunately, most senior marketing executives lack fundamental skill sets to innovate new services, especially digitally provisioned services.

Most senior marketing executives lack – are utterly bereft of what I call IT service management chops. And yet, the marketing executives that will have the big wins over this next 5 or 10 years will essentially be senior IT execs and CIOs that understand the concept of customer-making, the primacy of brands as a way of engaging customers in the value proposition, and more specifically, the provisioning of online interactive services as a core innovation to the customer-making process.

That’s why most chief marketing officers of major companies today will simply be out of the game in 3 to 5 years. They will have to retire out or do other sorts of boutique consulting because fundamentally they are suited up for hockey when everyone else is doing ballet.

Not good news, huh?

PvT: No, not at all. Not at all, and I’m sure most marketers would not want to hear that, so.

MM: Well, as I mentioned it before, William Gibson, has this great aphorism: The future arrives unevenly distributed, i.e., some people get it, some people don’t, those that don’t end up feeling a lot of pain and hurt as a function of being laggard on innovation-adoption curve and, more specifically, the future that arrived yesterday. We need to play a little catch.

Customer-making mindset, plus systems

PvT: Okay. So what do you consider as the core elements of a tightly integrated marketing model? And that’s sort of a loaded question…

MM: It sure is. Well, not to belabor the points that I’ve already made. First, you need to have a customer-making mindset; you must integrate the systems and compensation of pre-sales and post-sales to customer-making process benchmarks.

Second, you need to have the analytic discipline and rigor to be able to identify your ideal customers and predict lifetime or long-term value. You must understand your customer.

Third, you need to develop the operational capability of listening: mood of the market, voice of the customer, and patterns of engagement.

Fourth, you to put into place agile methodologies for the development of content and services used promotional reach and engagement.

Now some companies people start with the social media and social networks; they start with a voice with which some customer might connect and begin a dialog.

Social media enables a firm to initiate emotional connection with its customers, and get hints about what’s really going on, and then using those intuitions and soft perceptions drive a broad-spectrum analytic practice and develop true rigor about who is your customer.

So, you know, it can mean a Yin and Yang kind of thing where they feed on each other. It should result in a positive feedback loop: listening begats better content and services that in turn produces “earned media” in the form of praise and recommendations in the Web 2.0 mediaspace, that you inform above the line mass market creative strategies, and so on.

So to unpack your loaded question, the fundament challenge confronting the marketing executive today entails building operational capabilities within the context of an operational marketing platform—a business process-management platform for marketing-related activities.

Unlike marketing automation tools for “doing the marketing process”, the operational marketing platform must also support the rapid, agile development and provisioning new interactive services—essential software applications, service mash-ups, and widgets.

With good listening tools and process, combined with collaboration and scheduling systems, the operational marketing platform becomes an innovation-services platform

That idea nicely summarizes how innovation and marketing have converged in terms of a core competency, vis-a-vie this platform.

PvT: In your opinion, what operational changes can organizations make to get a better picture of that customer? You’ve addressed several big topics. However, many organizations have very siloed systems, making it difficult to access needed data. For example, a retail customer may be quite different from an online customer, and rather than integrating that data they keep that data separate, in separate databases. What are some of the things that you think organizations can do, or should do, to address the issue?

MM: Well, let me go back to what I call the axiomatic assumption of the commercial enterprise, and then from that examine some of the propositions or key premise of commercial activity.

Peter Drucker, God bless him, said, ‘The firm has no other purpose than to find and serve customers. Only 2 things add value: innovation and marketing. All else is cost.’

So there you have a quintessential operating principle. There is no other purpose than to find and serve customers. That’s what I call a customer-making process.

So you can put Band-Aids on cancer but if, fundamentally, you do not have a mindset of customer-making, which is, ‘I am building systems, processes, and accountabilities for managing the process of attracting, serving, and keeping customers life, then everything kinds gets muddled, confusing, and a big hairball of politics and turf.

Customer benefit

First, we like to put it into more simple terms: “How does the customer benefit?

Whatever operational or tactical changes that a firm wants to consider, we recommend that that they ‘solve backward’ from customer-making as an integrated analysis-driven process.

Now, there are many companies that aspire to that, but for lack of leadership and the inertia of their business, they encounter a lot of difficulty. We believe that they simply need a better, more fun way of innovating new operational capabilities—yep, from the bottom up with those folks that actually know first-hand what’s going on.

Second, if you accept that innovation and marketing represent the two primary drivers of wealth creation and value, it then follows that customers 30 years or younger will no longer experience the world as online and offline, it’s just the world.

There’s no first life and second life, it’s just life. And as a function of that they start to interact with customers with what I call a digital third hand.

Digital third hands

Now a digital third hand is quite literally how they have developed the cognitive ability and the muscle-memory reflex of interacting in a purely digital world.

In our digital world, we experience an appetite for interacting with brand and communities of brand users that have fundamentally altered marketing and innovation—new business requirements that marketing and innovation must now satisfy.

One, consumers that are 30 years and younger today, for the most part are no longer represent singular economic actors, rather, they represent a clique, a crew, or a pod of 4 or 8 people – their best friends with whom the text message each other 50 times a day!

These younger adults tend to select their best friends not just on shared values and sense of humor; rather on the basis of cognitive specialties—what John Garner talks about as multiple intelligences and cognitive-skill specialties—that offset and complement others in the crew or pod.

This means that somebody in the group will be really good with data, arithmetic, and logic. Somebody else will have aesthetic or design sense—fashion, design, and color. Another person will be really good with interpersonal dynamics, empathy, and support.

This means that marketers must give up the conceit of marketing to an individual demo-psychographic profile.

Rather, we must learn how to market to a pod or crew with collective IQ many times greater than any one individual consumer.

This means that the collective unit will detect any hint of bullshit, manipulation, coercion, or underhandedness, and heap immediate retribution on offenders: the highest form of which is willful apathy and deliberate dis-engagement. Wow. Try marketing in that!

Some marketer will also suffer a public reprimand in front of millions of consumers on YouTube and the mainstream pick-up of outrageous videos.

So, as a function of digital third-handed customers, who then through instant messaging and SMS, and other kinds of presencing thing, be it Twitter or whatever, not only must you market to the pod, but you must market to the cognitive diversity that defines that pod.

Requirement for multimodal content

So that means that you need multimodal content things like Podcasts, and webinars, and newsletters, and interactive calculators if there’s a return on investment.

You need to do customer interviews so people can associate into the narrative, into the journey of customer-making.

So marketing, on one hand, becomes much more integrated, it becomes much more multi-channel and multi-modal in terms of the cognitive styles it must satisfy.

The third thing that happens is that these pods start to form larger networks – federal networks, and out of this they start to organize themselves in terms of movements or de facto unions.

And oftentimes a c-captain – a community captain – will appoint him or herself as the leader of this loosely gathered federal nation of interested people. So they will start – how can I say – exerting far greater influence than quote-unquote “a single loud-mouth” had in the past.

PvT: Okay. What regional considerations must firms accommodate in their global marketing strategy?

MM: Sure. Let’s start by breaking localization into four geographic mental maps.

First, we have what many call pan-regional marketing area. For example, this typically includes Asia Pacific (also called APAC) or in some cases Indo-Pacific where the mental map falls along the lines of English-speaking areas (which would include India, Australia, and New Zealand) And, EMEA—Europe, Middle East, and Africa as well as Latin America (although my Brazilian clients remind me that Brazilians do not consider themselves as Latin Americans!)

In each of those areas, a global marketing organization has to localize the marketing material, both print and online, across dozens of languages and currencies.

There’s a whole new business eco-system that has begun to emerge around facilitating or driving pan-regional localization of marketing content, as well as services related to the pre-sales and post-sales interactions with customers.

Then, the second geographic mental map address cultural markets with a more or less a unified language and currency, emphasizing the challenges how to maintain a global voice and cultural resonance. From an operational perspective, this emphasizes the integration of traditional and newer marketing processes.

So it’s, if you will, a global brand with local flavors. For example, many Americans make the mistake—I should say many North Americans—make the mistake of translating a piece of collateral or web content into German and consider their work done—that it will work well or good enough in Germany, the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, and Austria. In most cases, it does not work.

You don’t need more than 5 minutes in a conversation in the café in any one of those areas to understand that they are incredibly tribal, and they make hyper-acute discernments about haircuts, shoes, facial expressions, so as to establish you’re part of my tribe or you’re not part of my tribe.

What works in the Southern part of Germany doesn’t work in the Northern part of Germany, and it certainly doesn’t work in Switzerland, and it categorically won’t work in Austria; different metaphors, different visuals, different motifs, and different underlying narratives in terms of what it means to be a consumer and in a relationship with the brand and the tribe of brand users.

The third geographic mental map address mini markets within a country—I’ve already tipped my hand by saying micro-localization within a country.

So, for example, my work with clients in the Netherlands led me to discover the hyper-tribal nature of their local markets. I am astounded just in this tiny little country of the Netherlands, the Dutch remain fiercely tribal with respect to the very southern parts of the Netherlands, such a Einhoven, to the greater Amsterdam area, to the northern parts which are more Flemish as opposed to the more French folks in the southern parts. The Dutch make very, very sharp distinctions about, again, haircuts, clothing styles, inflected speech, manners of metaphors, key words and phrases, that all mark out, oh, you’re not one of us; oh, you are one of us.

Neo-tribalism

You know, Marshall McLuhan was right. All this technology of electronic media cools us down, making us very primal and triabal—what he even called Neo-tribalism. Wow, if he could have only seen instant messaging, SMS, and social networking in action, he would smile with great satisfaction of having understood the root sociology of the Networked Age.

As this relates to marketing, it means that marketing has to become much more tribal too–much more specific to the subcultures and niches within an otherwise unified market.

And finally, we come to the fourth geographic mental map of localization.

It has to do with the newer developments of mass customization, shopper marketing, and remix culture.

Shopper marketing drives the idea of segmentation into the floor plans of individual retailers and shopping malls, specifically drawing upon the very rich practice of database marketing and database analytics.

Shopper marketing takes that same analytic principles to the actual physical footprint of each retail store, specifically asking the question, ‘Who are my most profitable customers?’ and ‘How can we stage products micro-theaters, or ‘design moments’ in interior design-speak that engage with very specific shopper demographics.

Say, for example, a married woman with 3 or more children. Single dad with 1 or 2 kids. Divorced or bachelor male, late 40s. And when these individual demographic or psychographic segments walk into a store, they have certain core needs that you could think of as the basic staples. Then around those staples, shopper marketing details higher margin impulse items that we know appeals to that particular shopper demographic. Imagine that these little stages track to particular local high school or college sporting events.

I see this Whole Foods and WalMart—at both ends of the competitive spectrum.

So as a global brand marketer, you must have brand architecture and promotional content that express the basic narratives and core values of the brand while providing enough flexibility, within a robust framework, that will work at the pan-regional, cultural, in-country, and shopper-marketing levels.

So localization now means getting it right down into the individual store.

For marketing organizations, this means that they must specify and source content in ‘liquid’ form. They must have content that various staffers and partners can mix and match into very unique expressions right down to an individual store kiosk, or a trade show booth, or a direct mail piece like a catalog, and so on.