Position Yourself for a Rapidly Evolving Digital Space

Master the most in-demand skills and tools. Google Adwords, user interface, mobile design, responsive design and, for larger organizations, full-stack design skills are at the top of the list for employers looking for talent.

Create various digital assets. Hone your skills and strategic approaches around creating websites that are able to unite other assets a company may possess, such as social media channels, to create more impactful environments across technologies and platforms. This is a key priority for organizations in making themselves more competitive overall.

Strategy first. At the digital marketing/UX level, it is critically important to put the user and platform first when developing digital content and technological assets. Particular elements such as screen size, mobile consideration and transfers between phone and computer and the effects this can exert on key customers and communities is essential.

Regional focus is a factor. As cities and their supporting economies, key industries and communities evolve at different paces with separate considerations and priorities, it is important to consider their impact on technology.

The Future of Digital Marketing and UX Careers

Going forward, integrated video and live stream technologies, along with increased automation capabilities and the 2-D/3-D design elements these bring with them will continue to lead the charge in the evolving digital field. To ensure you maintain your advantage, it’s important to keep several tips in mind:

Be a digital asset, and maintain yourself. With the marketing discipline becoming increasingly specialized, it is essential that you decide the direction you want to go in, hone your specific skill set and continue to focus on refining and innovating in that area. Don’t be a “master of none.”

Focus on innovation and staying ahead of the latest and greatest. Certifications are largely losing value due to the frenetic speed at which the market and digital industry is moving. You are best off spending your time remaining abreast of trends, nuances and opportunities within your specific skill area to remain at the front of the pack.

Stay organically committed. In short, do project work on the side to boost your portfolio. With most hiring decisions now based directly on portfolios, they hold as much—if not more—weight than your rĂ©sumĂ©. Keep this in mind as you grow in your skills and knowledge to be sure that is reflected accurately in your visual materials.

Stay professional and never stop innovating (strategically). It is always advisable to maintain high professional standards and be mindful of the delicate balance of the admittedly embraced “quirkiness” of talent by the market. Let the creativity and innovative spirit flow, but don’t forget to keep your eye on the strategic focus, dynamic opportunity and innovative capability of the digital landscape.

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Steve Jobs seized the moment with iTunes and the 99-cent song. But even downloads have been unable to check the sales decline of music products. Streaming has overtaken the music industry as the engine of growth. Streaming is not another product. It is a business model that uses digital technologies to sell music as a service, meaning access without ownership that is available on-demand and paid for by use or by subscription. The two biggest services are Pandora, a personalized radio service, and Spotify, offering a catalog of music.

Service-based offerings are not new, but technology has made it possible for such offerings to make inroads into categories that have long been exclusively product-centric. Digital disruption does not reward traditional centers of power. It re-channels the flow of industry revenues. Unless incumbent brands give up old ways of operating, new sources of value and growth will elude them because the new flow of revenue will not renew existing streams or automatically redirect new streams to incumbents. Consumers can get the benefits they want in new ways. The old ways aren’t coming back.

As it will in all categories, digital disruption is forcing the music industry to remake itself. There are four critical lessons brands can learn from the digital transformation of the music industry.

1. Look to Experiences for Value and Growth

In music, this is seen in the booming opportunity to build value from live concert experiences. Music festivals have become a worldwide cultural phenomenon, to the point that observers now worry about “.” Clubs, live streaming, awards shows and house concerts are part of this, too. Live music is buoying an interrelated ecosystem of auxiliary revenue streams such as food, transportation, lodging, clothing and other merchandise.

The service-based business model of live concerts offers value and growth that premium music products can no longer command. Historically, music ticket prices have risen faster than inflation. This continues, even as the value of recorded music products is falling. In 2015, the average live music ticket price hit an all-time high. Technological innovation in virtual and augmented reality will add even more value to live experiences.

Brands in all categories can include an experiential layer, even for low-involvement products that are purchased habitually. This could entail things like personal curation or concierges, instruction, insider access, collaboration or technology enhancements. Brands must look at the future differently and think about how to use experiences to build more value.

2. Relationships Win Out Over Branding

This is obvious in music, where the shared experience has always been powerful. But music is not the only thing that people want to share. People rely on social guideposts for everything. Digital disruption brings relationships to the forefront in all categories.

In fact, building closer, stronger relationships with customers is critical for brands that want to compete for experiences. In the world of digital platforms, it’s all about winning the competition for relationships, which is why Amazon has a soup-to-nuts ecosystem of customer engagement. Amazon uses brands to build its own relationship with customers. No brand is safe unless it secures its own relationships.

3. Small Brands Have a Bigger Opportunity in a Marketplace Upended by Digital

The prevailing narrative about digital is that it is winner-take-all. Indeed, this has been borne out many times. Network effects are the reason. They create natural monopolies. The more people in a network, the more value it has to people. So people migrate to the biggest networks, which makes them even bigger and thus even more valuable, which in turn, attracts even more people. Pretty soon, almost everybody is in one network.

But network effects matter only when networks are essential to the value of the brand, which is not the case for most brands. Music demonstrates this because digital disruption has opened up the industry rather than narrowing it down.

More artists, not fewer, can get a share of the business nowadays. In 2000, the top 100 tours commanded almost 90% of annual concert revenues. In 2014, this figure was halved to 44%. Certainly, the biggest artists still command the lion’s share of revenues from music product sales and streaming. But artists are more likely nowadays to see more types of opportunities to build a steady, long-term career, rather than having just one long shot at success.

The transformation of categories by digital has shaken loose a lot of new opportunities for brands and companies willing and able to pursue value and growth in new places.

4. Brands Must Get Outside of the Data

Streaming services and other digital music platforms use algorithms to classify people’s tastes and then predict what people might like to hear. Such algorithms are not unique to music. Recommendation engines, to mention one example, are commonplace.  

One criticism of algorithms is that they lock people into echo chambers of existing tastes, thereby shutting people off from new or different things. In fact, this is exactly what digital delivery and distribution platforms are trying to achieve. To survive, brands need to get outside of the data.

This is the paradox of the digital era. Old-timey analog or non-digital connections have become more, not less, important. Analog is critical to mastering digital. Brands want to drive algorithms, not be driven over by them. The good news is that brands have many options for doing this, some of which are already familiar, like traditional media, sponsorships, partnerships, placements, apps, tie-ins, opinion leaders and personal solicitations. Digital makes these more important, not less, as it ushers in an era of algorithms. Brands must find ways to escape the commoditizing pull of algorithmic modeling.

The music industry is learning as it goes. The marketplace of music as a service is a work in progress, but it is the future. Brands in all categories must rethink their propositions and business models. Music offers some lessons and guidance, but brands must approach the digital future with a willingness to experiment and a commitment to reinvention. As every musician can attest, perfection takes lots of practice. That is perhaps the biggest lesson that music has to teach brands.

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These firms are the drivers of innovation and growth in the global economy. They provide lower cost, greater efficiency and enormous consumer benefits, but Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California, argues that Google, Amazon and Facebook have “hijacked the original decentralized vision of the internet” and created monopolies that “now determine the future of the music, film, publishing and news industries.”

Taplin’s book, , offers an important perspective on the technology revolution to which marketers should be alert: Revolutions, whether the French Revolution of the 18th century or the Russian Revolution of the 20th century, often overreach and fail to achieve their original vision.

The internet revolution, Taplin argues, was supposed to bring us more democracy; instead it has concentrated power and wealth in fewer hands and created oligarchy.

Move Fast and Break Things will challenge your views about free-market economics, digital disruption, antitrust regulation, industry consolidation and whether the internet is as positive for society as was hoped. What intrigues me about Taplin and his book is the combination of thoughtful argument, individual passion for the subject and marvelous storytelling by an observer who has lived through the digital disruption of his industry. Taplin isn’t bitter; he’s prospered and succeeded. Yet he clearly fears something important is being sacrificed in the digital revolution.

Taplin believes that artists and content creators have suffered at the hands of the digital platform providers, making society the loser. He argues that government funding created the internet revolution, yet the returns of those investments are being earned by a few individuals.

Taplin began his career after graduating from Princeton University in 1969. He got a job working for Albert Grossman, one of the most influential managers in the music business at the time. He cut his teeth in the music and entertainment business as the tour manager for The Band. Taplin laments that power has unfairly shifted from the artists and producers of content to a small number of hyper-rich entrepreneurs. Where a musician might have made a reasonable living as a performer in years past, today’s technology, along with misguided public policy, has diminished and stripped power from the creators. Taplin believes society will suffer from this loss.

Taplin explains how our approach to copyright laws failed to support performers like the late Levon Helm of The Band. Unlike his bandmate Robbie Robertson, Helm received no credits for writing songs. Helm was purely a performer who earned royalties from the recordings of his performances until the internet arrived and file-sharing technology destroyed his income stream. While entrepreneurs argued that “content wants to be free,” Helm, suffering from throat cancer at age 70, had to return to the road and give performances to keep a roof over his head.

“The tech elite’s jealous guarding of its own monopoly is built upon the blatant disregard for the artist’s intellectual property,” says Taplin.

Taplin explains that we’ve allowed enormous industry consolidation because federal regulators cared more about the consumer market price results than potential dominance and predation. He also has plenty to say about the failures of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Taplin’s take on Google is equally compelling. He views Google as failing to live up to its motto of “Don’t be evil.” He says Google is hypocritical for aggressively protecting its own intellectual property while not respecting the intellectual property of content creators.

Taplin criticizes Amazon and Jeff Bezos, describing at length how Amazon can selectively punish the publishing houses that fail to yield to its marketplace power.

He challenges Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his aproach: “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you aren’t moving fast enough.”

When I was growing up in the 1950s, I remember watching a television report about the impact of computer technology and factory automation. In the technology world, we’ve always assumed that innovation and disruption would create more benefits than costs. Jobs would be lost to technology, but workers would adapt, retrain and ultimately everyone would be better off, including the workforce that was disrupted.

In Move Fast and Break Things, Taplin asks us to reflect on the technology revolution and explore whether our perception of innovation and disruption may be damaging our fundamental institutions. Are we properly applying laws and traditions to the technology industry?

Personally, I’m all for technology innovation and growth. I suspect Taplin is, too. His book simply reminds us we might want to move just a little slower and not break things quite so much. Otherwise, we might not like the results.

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Accumulating studies pinpoint the impact of increasing numbers of marketing drivers, customer behaviors and resultant financial outcome metrics. For example, the list of potential drivers has expanded to incorporate many digital and mobile marketing investments in new formats, delivered through new media platforms and sales channels. We understand more about intermediate steps in the process leading to financial outcomes, such as customer satisfaction. Our comprehension of the effects of marketing is becoming more refined, often including both impact on financials and how marketing responds to financial performance.

Understanding marketing impact often includes both the macro view at the market level over time, and the micro view at the individual level, such as customer segments or purchase occasions. Understanding costs is also becoming more explicit in research, where cost elements are identified within total economic value measures to isolate marketing’s impact from things that are outside of its domain.

Converging evidence shows that management executives and board members with marketing experience contribute in positive ways to business performance. This has implications for recruiting, selecting and training people in marketing to achieve business improvements.

Going forward, we need more insights on business questions as currently defined, based on research of new strategies, drivers and talent. However, we may also need to get new perspectives on what marketing ROI is by asking different questions.

Business decision-makers need guidance to manage financial performance. This can come from tools that enable them to experiment with alternative actions via simulation or further data analysis. Research into data visualization and dashboards could be useful for this purpose. Flexibility in changing inputs and assumptions is key. Precision is less relevant since this is about predicting an uncertain future. The priority is potential financial benefit and risk to the business under alternative scenarios.

No single marketing analysis tool will be the determining factor in decision-making. Companies have a portfolio of decision options. While some may represent large investments and happen quickly, others will unfold over time and require numerous adjustments.

Implementing a strategic decision may require another level of support to manage the intervention. For example, when J.C. Penny switched to everyday low prices and discontinued price discounts, its executives didn’t consider potential resistance from customers. When Netflix pivoted to online streaming, its executives didn’t anticipate the impact on the legacy business. These interventions might have been more effective if marketers had gamed out unintended consequences and how to work through them.

Much of the available research on financial performance is based on relatively stable markets and companies. This stands to reason since there’s a compelling need to draw on historical data to understand what works. However, digital marketing, mobile marketing, Big Data and artificial intelligence are fundamentally different from history.

Ad spending, for example, has shifted toward digital, which now exceeds TV ad spending. The change is shifting the variable costs of advertisers for different types of impressions. More ad buying is taking place on digital platforms. The nature of creative development is changing to adapt to new media. The number and types of people required to work on this part of the marketing process are different. From a marketing ROI perspective, the cost base of existing business models is changing for advertisers, creative and media agencies, research firms and support services. At some point, this is a change in kind, not just degree.

This type of structural change should be examined for all of the cost drivers in marketing ROI work. The sales force is one of the most powerful elements of the marketing mix. How does this change when digital technology influences B-to-B selling with more digital content, more AI and CRM software and fewer salespeople?

A more radical change in kind is the shift in business models by disrupters. How many companies will fundamentally alter the structure of the market like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Netflix and Airbnb? These companies created new industries and new competitors, and they impact the marketing activities of other industries. Facebook now leads the mobile advertising category, something that barely existed five years ago.

How many successful disrupters will continue to disrupt? Which of the large-scale moves—such as Amazon’s foothold in bricks-and-mortar stores or Google providing ordering services for Walmart—will endure?

What’s the likely impact of new business strategies reported in the press? Will Facebook invest substantial sums in acquiring video content and compete with Netflix, Amazon and HBO? Would this change Facebook’s revenue model from its current base in mobile advertising to other forms, such as consumer subscription? How would this change advertisers’ plans for content creation and implementation?

Apple is poised to make significant investments in augmented reality for its phones. In addition to stimulating demand, how will this feature impact advertising, sales and customer management applications for marketers?

Marketers must still answer traditional ROI questions in markets that are less affected by digital transformation, but more firms will be touched by structural changes, requiring new questions to be asked. It’s likely that the available marketing mix will be quite different five years from now.

Once companies accept that marketing expertise is valuable, what do they do next to outperform their competition? How should they deploy their resources to build or buy organizational capabilities? This entails costs for recruiting, training and acquiring companies with marketing skill. This requires different managerial skills to manage such talent, especially if it’s new to their company culture. How do they ensure that the marketing orientation they are seeking gets infused into the daily operations of the business?

Lots of progress has been made in linking marketing with financial outcomes of firms. The future promises more change, both evolutionary and revolutionary. Marketing experts need to be open to more development in the thinking and tools needed to create insights for a future that is increasingly hard to predict.

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AR allows users to insert a digital object into the real world via AR-enabled devices, such as smartphones. VR differs in that it instantly fully immerses users in a digital or virtual 360-degree space, using a headset, such as Oculus Rift. Beyond games, these technologies are reshaping how Fortune 500 companies conduct their marketing efforts.

For example,  in 2013 so that customers could visualize what a piece of furniture would look like in their homes before buying. The Swedish home furnishings chain recently announced its IKEA Place app, which is now available via Apple’s ARKit on iOS 11. These AR solutions help bridge the gap between virtual, on-demand shopping and the emotional connections made when one sees a product in person—and they’re only going to get more widespread.

In the world of B-to-B, the opportunities are ripe for the taking. B-to-B products and services are typically complex and hard to define, especially for global sales and marketing teams trying to communicate a consistent message. Mixed reality (a term for both AR and VR) allows marketers to simplify their company’s unique value story while keeping customers engaged throughout the buying journey. It allows users to take prospects into environments they would otherwise be unable to enter (an oil rig, data center or laboratory) and demonstrate how their solutions can aid a business. Using AR and VR requires convincing the C-suite. There are five steps you should take to make the best pitch for implementing AR and/or VR in your business.

1. Define the Problem

Before you recommend that your CMO let you build an awesome AR/VR app, clarify the problem you’re trying to solve. Is your product too big to ship to trade shows? Are your product lines too complex to communicate in a two-dimensional way? Whatever the problem may be, you need to define it and ask yourself if AR or VR will help you solve it. If your goal is to tell a story in a visually engaging way, then the answer is probably, “Yes.”

2. Get Input from Users

Once you’ve determined that AR or VR is right for your company’s needs, get input from the people who will be putting it to use. Folks working the trade show floor or the sales and marketing team responsible for selling need a more effective way to market your products. Your case can only be strengthened by truly understanding their needs.

3. Analyze Cost

Who’s going to build this AR/VR application? Any good argument must be backed up by research. Many people have tried to build their own AR/VR applications in-house, but few have been successful.

More digital agencies are now offering AR/VR capabilities, but it’s often not their sole focus. Find a company that specializes in mixed reality and in your specific industry.

4. Demonstrate the Potential Results

No one, especially not a CMO, is going to buy into your mixed reality dream unless you demonstrate that it can work. Companies that adopt interactive applications, for example, see about an 85% reduction in trade-show shipping costs and increased product win rates by up to 33%. Come prepared with statistics and case studies. Case studies are a great way to show your CMO that similar companies—competitors, even—have adopted AR/VR and seen tremendous results.

5. Schedule a Meeting

Once you’ve prepared with the steps above, schedule a meeting with your CMO to talk through your findings. Review your presentation beforehand so you can come prepared to answer questions and counter any skepticism.

AR and VR are already penetrating the B-to-C and B-to-B markets, becoming a significant component of marketing strategy. But it’s more than just a trend—it can lead to serious ROI. As long as you know what problem you’re trying to solve, how your team will implement the technology, what resources will be needed and the results you hope to see, your CMO might warm to the idea of embracing AR/VR as a marketing tool.

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Housing roughly 25 employees, the space consists of a reception area, two conference rooms, an open-office work area and a bar and entertaining area. Each area was customized for its specific purpose. Intricate details mixed with existing elements, such as Terrazzo flooring, add character while complementing the building’s history.

Design: NELSON

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Now in the unfolding age of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, connected smart products and robots, we’re still on that same journey to satisfy our needs, but with the assistance of these evolving capabilities and objects along the way. These capabilities and objects are organized into systems that can deliver a high level of personalized service, and they offer relief from numerous control and decision-making activities. It’s not just the consumer’s journey that’s been impacted by these technological advances. Below that journey, agriculture and the supply chain have been increasingly automated as well. What emerges are complex adaptive systems that pose an existential threat to marketing if the field cannot define its role.

Nature of the Beast

Connected smart products (aka internet of things) embody certain capabilities and skills. These objects can be physical and virtual and are often combined in a product-service system that addresses multiple steps in the customer journey. The objects can communicate with one another and their users via circuits, signals, the cloud, various devices and their associated interfaces such as touch pads and microphones.

While there are different opinions on what makes a product “smart,” it’s fundamentally about the ability to learn, adapt and operate autonomously. Analogous to human actors, smart objects take in data from the environment via sensors and receivers. They use processors to recognize patterns in the data and make predictions. These objects respond along reinforced pathways, sometimes with actuators that convert energy to motion, and they adapt when the response doesn’t produce the expected outcome.

The attributes that make products smart rely heavily on engines and user interfaces (UIs). An engine is a core program that coordinates the operation of other programs. Search and recommendation engines are probably the most well-known, but there are many others. The UI receiving the most attention today is the voice-enabled user interface, which requires natural language capability. We’re all familiar with Alexa and Siri, but consider Garmin’s recently introduced GTN Telligence for the general aviation market. GTN Telligence provides voice control over panel-mounted avionics, which reduces pilot workload and is a step toward the digital copilot. In terms of development, facial recognition (iPhone X), augmented reality (“Pokemon Go”) and even virtual reality are not far behind voice recognition. These UIs will drive the evolution of customer relationship management from personalization to personification.

Marketing Myopia Redux?

The question remains: Where is marketing in all of this? Much of the discussion in marketing dealing with AI and machine learning is centered around impacting the buyer’s search. It makes sense that new technologies would gravitate first to the data-rich area of search and promotion, where considerable inefficiencies exist due to mistargeting, and ROI can be quickly realized. That supposition is supported by a recent survey of AI and machine learning suppliers conducted by TechEmergence. The respondents identified search as their No. 1 most-profitable application today and over the next five years. Their primary value proposition was generating new revenue for their clients with a focus on e-commerce, digital media and retail. Product development received limited mention, as did customer service, despite the widespread adoption of chat bots.

Perhaps as the application of smart digital tools to search begins to show diminishing returns, marketers will realize the need to take ownership of the entire customer journey, or risk marginalization. That involves assuming responsibility for the integration of new technologies at every step of the journey. Paramount among those steps is understanding use.

Smart products will be the competitive weapon of the future. When the most convenient and intuitive option is affordable, customers will choose it. Some smart products address convenience by providing intelligent assistance so that the customer need not open a user manual, call a helpline or make an appointment at the Genius Bar. A smart product in one domain can supplant unintelligent products in another. With Google Maps on your smartphone, do you really need a dashboard-mounted navigator? Moreover, incumbents in traditional industries face the risk of disintermediation (cutting out the middleman) or “Uberization,” when a competitor wedges a smart product into the relationship with the customer.

Finding Marketing Magic

Decades ago, Peter Drucker said, “It is the aim of marketing to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.” This sounds like a lofty ideal, but today’s smart products are increasingly able to get intimate with customers, learn, adapt to their habits and changing needs and nearly sell themselves. Nobody is claiming that promotion will disappear, but less promotional effort is required for products that break the mold, delight early adopters and go viral (or at least receive a ton of free coverage), such as Amazon’s Echo and Echo Dot.

Alexa is a textbook example of a complex adaptive system (CAS) that marketers need to wrap their heads around. A CAS is a network of interacting entities whose collective behavior is distinct from its subparts. Think of a school of fish. A CAS lacks clear boundaries. It is self-organizing, often nested with memory; feedback loops; and behaviors that are chaotic (butterfly effect), nonlinear, unplanned and unpredictable. But the most distinguishing characteristic of a CAS is its ability to adapt and learn.

To get a feeling for a CAS, visit the Alexa Skill Store to see the many ways that Amazon has encouraged developers to create skills that leverage Alexa’s built-in capabilities. There are currently more than 15,000 skills. Skills extend the capability of the smart product to perform additional tasks, which creates a more personalized experience for the user. Alexa skills now direct and control other smart devices like home environment and lighting.

Getting Started

Most firms are not at the cutting edge of new technologies, and some have yet to dip their toes in the water. If your industry or company is among those late adopters, here are some ways that you can get things moving.

Examine the customer journey horizontally to identify where the insertion of smart technology can add convenience and/or personalization and perhaps reduce costs. Journey analytics and mapping is a good place to begin.

If a smart product is the answer, think of the offering as having three parts: your traditional product, a smart system addition and one or more UIs. The smart system will likely be hosted in a third-party cloud (such as Amazon Web Services) and will be composed of skills. Among the choice of UIs, you would be remiss not to consider the smartphone, as mobility is key.

Add a smart adapter to connect your product with its smart system. One option is a small streaming USB stick like Roku. These sticks provide Wi-Fi connectivity and some processing power to run apps.

While Wi-Fi modules and UIs are available off the shelf, skills create the unique customer experience that builds loyalty and continued engagement. Of course, someone must create those engines and skills. While writing code may not be your bailiwick, marketers should participate in software requirements specification. This involves assembling the whole (the CAS) out of building blocks such as user profiles, matching rules and learning algorithms to improve matching.

Our experience working with large automakers as well as startups suggests focusing on a specific application or skill first. While creating a platform is the holy grail in business strategy, traditional product companies and marketers are well-advised to begin with a specific application using as many components off the shelf as possible.

Put a premium on collecting feedback data on your first skill and run it through analytics and a rapid prototyping process to optimize the customer experience. â€‹

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The song that best personifies today’s college student is the ironically titled “Very Busy People” by The Limousines. Rather than war and civil rights, the lyrics detail young people plagued with ennui. When they manage to get out of bed, they busy themselves with their voluminous digital music libraries and watch the same movie over and over again. 

Despite the wealth of information made available by digital technology and the comforts afforded by modern life, many of today’s marketing students are simply bored.

Boredom as a pervasive feeling is a relatively recent phenomenon. Our forebears didn’t have the luxury of boredom; crops needed to be harvested, factories needed to be staffed, danger and disease loomed frighteningly. There simply wasn’t time to be bored. Classical literature provides us with the trope of the superfluous aristocrat who spends all day in insipid idleness, but boredom was a foreign concept for the majority of people.

Today’s marketing student is certainly no stranger to boredom. Whether it’s digital distraction or something more existential, such as a feeling that there is nothing great left to accomplish, many college students seem to be unexcited about what’s happening in the world around them. Not surprisingly, this feeling of boredom is evident in the marketing classroom. Students checking their phones, stifling yawns or staring vacantly into oblivion are familiar sights to the vast majority of marketing professors. While previous generations may have viewed college as a time for exploration, many of today’s marketing students view college as four years that must be endured before they can start making money.

To provide insight into the causes and consequences of boredom in the classroom, we recently conducted a survey of business students from public and private universities. The results of our research were extremely interesting: Although the majority of students indicated that they sometimes felt bored during their classes, a significantly higher percentage of marketing majors (versus non-marketing majors) say they often experience boredom in the classroom. Marketing majors were also more likely than non-marketing majors to find quantitative courses (e.g., marketing research, statistics and analytics) boring. 

Marketing majors were also more likely than non-marketing majors to make external attributions for their feelings of boredom. They don’t believe it is their fault that they are bored, rather it is someone or something else in the classroom that contributes to their feelings of boredom. Sometimes it’s their classmates who, because they don’t participate in class discussion, create a more boring environment. Other times, it’s the classroom environment itself, marked by large lecture-style auditoriums or antiquated technology. However, according to our respondents, it’s often the professor who contributes to a boring environment. This happens when the professor lectures too much, or when the pace of the class moves too slowly for students’ liking. Whatever the case may be, these results might be explained by some interesting psychological differences between marketing and non-marketing majors. For instance, marketing majors score higher in the personality trait called “need for arousal,” which may help explain their persistent feelings of boredom.

Regardless, the downstream consequences of boredom can have deleterious effects on marketing professors and their departments. Marketing majors are more likely to punish the professor when they felt bored by slamming them on course evaluations. Moreover, students are more likely to tell other students not to take a class with a boring professor, which has financial ramifications for departments that often have to justify their budgets on the basis of enrollment.

However, while the natural reaction from professors might be to assume that these results are “sour grapes” from less-than-dedicated students or, like the students, externally attribute the evaluations to their colleagues, the truth is that we can mitigate these feelings of boredom in how we structure our classes. For instance, marketing majors are more sensitive than non-marketing majors to whether course content is perceived as relevant to their career goals. Furthermore, just as marketing majors have higher needs for arousal, they are also more open to new experiences, which implies that they may be more receptive to professors trying new pedagogical strategies in the classroom. Hands-on, experiential exercises that simulate some of the experiences they will face in their entry-level jobs would likely be perceived positively. Breaking up lecture halls into various activity centers and encouraging Socratic, small-group sessions might be particularly appealing to marketing students.

We do not advocate devolving marketing instruction into “edutainment,” but we believe more effort should be made to align content with different learning modalities and trends in industry.

Like the protagonists in “Very Busy People,” bored marketing students have many distractions competing for their attention. It’s incumbent that we use the marketing classroom to gain and hold attention, stimulate interest and provoke engagement for the benefit of boredom-prone students. Boredom is the enemy of learning. Overcoming it would serve the best interests of students, higher education, employers and the marketing profession.

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What is the blockchain? Most marketers would likely answer this question by mumbling something about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, but is a true believer in the technology. 

“I happen to think that this thing is the internet at exponential levels in terms of importance,” says Epstein, who recently wrote the e-book “.” “My brother always says, ‘Jeremy, you drink way too much Kool-Aid. You’re totally off the deep end.’ There’s probably a lot of truth to that,” Epstein says. 

Is Epstein off the deep end or simply early to the pool party? The has grown as every marketer, financial expert and CEO struggles to figure out what the technology is and how it will change business. This has meant big expectations: The blockchain market, , is poised to, per Grand View Research. A study by Juniper Research finds that , and approximately 66% expect full integration of the blockchain by 2018.    

—a peer-to-peer digital currency valued at $9 billion worldwide, per BlockGeeks—has been the Blockchain’s main output and most recognizable application. Each Bitcoin is worth $4,385.95, as of October 2017; the cryptocurrency has been called a “bubble” by executive thought leaders like Mark Cuban and Ray Dalio, and is considered the future of currency by many futurists and excited investors. 

Beyond the pool parties and hype machines, what does the blockchain look like in marketing, and why does it matter in 2018?

A Blockchain Primer

An easy way to picture the blockchain is to think of a spreadsheet that is duplicated thousands of times across a network of computers. Changes to the spreadsheet are mandated by a series of rules. Once information is validated, it’s permanently added to the spreadsheet, becoming un-editable. The spreadsheet is updated on every computer when new information is added. Once updated, the spreadsheet is a publicly available record of each change. There’s no centralized location for this spreadsheet, making it extremely difficult to compromise. 

Put another way, the blockchain is a growing list of decentralized records—referred to as blocks—. 

The bullish Epstein says blockchain will not change the fundamentals of marketing, but it will change business execution and strategies, likely rocking the world of those who are unprepared. With blockchain, anyone can transfer valuable assets from one person to another person without a third-party trust broker. Data is protected by its decentralization, Epstein says; think robbing one house (a data center) versus robbing 5,000 houses (the blockchain).

Epstein asks marketers to consider a unit of advertising space as an item of value: “Right now, I go through my 55 different intermediaries [when buying an ad]. You don’t need that in a world of blockchain,” he says. “We’re going to have a way to guarantee that the advertising you’re buying is showing up on the site that you intended it to and your software is going to provide you assurances that it is displayed on the space you purchased. 
 It can be a pretty big game changer for marketers.”

For now, blockchain remains an idea in marketing, a hope. There’s no true front-running provider for blockchain marketing technology yet.  

Why Marketers Can’t Afford to Ignore Blockchain

“What’s your blockchain strategy?” will soon become a common question among marketers, says . The marketer, for now, should answer with, “To know what the hell it is,” Morgan says. 

Morgan is familiar with innovative and disruptive technology, as he’s worked in digital marketing since 1992, just before the internet became a behemoth. Morgan, like Epstein, believes that the blockchain will cause an internet-esque shift in marketing and business. He’s seen the blockchain up close—his company’s investor, , invests money in blockchain applications—and has become a believer in the technology. 

Marketers will be tempted to dive right into the blockchain, Morgan says, but understanding is the essential first step. “Try to spend time with people that understand blockchain,” Morgan says. “Take the time to learn and understand it, even if it seems obtuse and quite boring.” 

In the 1990s, marketers made a mistake by ignoring the internet until it became omnipresent. Then they spent years playing catch-up, Morgan says. Blockchain is too important to allow this to happen again. “What people need to understand is that this resets the control  of data, relationships and value creation,” he says.  

“[Marketers are] going to see consumers build relationships with companies,” Morgan says. “They will see federations of consumer groups that will leverage blockchain networks to exchange value and buy and sell services. [This will happen] just as people that only sold in bricks-and-mortar didn’t understand how much they were losing to e-commerce because they didn’t see it until it was too late.”

Blockchain’s Marketing Potential

Trust: one little word that means many big things in marketing.. However, Kathryn Beiser, global chair of Edelman’s corporate practice, says business is “the last retaining wall for trust. 
 Its leaders must step up on the issues that matter for society.” Enter the blockchain, which The Economist has called the “trust machine.”

Epstein gives a scenario for how marketers can use the blockchain to build trust with consumers: You go to the store to buy coffee. A brand bragging about its origins—an organic, family-owned farm in Nicaragua—catches your eye. “Imagine an application that lets you put your phone on top of [the coffee], scan it and see the entire supply chain of the coffee bean all the way back to the Gonzalez family in Nicaragua,” Epstein says. “You have total confidence that it’s not just a claim anymore because you have proof; everything has been verified and logged by the shipper.”

In this scenario, the cost of lying about a product becomes great while the value of telling the truth about it becomes greater. Marketers can tell the story of their product not simply as a storyteller, but as a documentarian. “That’s a great chance if 
 you can prove it,” Epstein says. “People will pay for the premium. People pay to be in line with their values.”

Now think beyond the product: With verified information on the blockchain, companies can be completely transparent about values and business practices. How many women are employed at Procter & Gamble, for example? How many minorities are employed by Google? Companies self-report this data, for the most part, but only a few people truly know the answers. With this information on a blockchain, consumers can trust that the company is telling the truth about its values, practices and statistics. 

“If you’re a marketer, you need to fundamentally understand that the days of total bullshitting are coming to an end,” Epstein says. 

Blockchain First Steps

Large companies should consider going a step further than simply learning about the blockchain, Epstein says: “You should move on this relatively quickly because right now, you have advantages that the startups don’t have: No. 1 you have customers, No. 2 you have a lot more money, No 3. you have global infrastructure, No. 4 you can operate at scale, and No. 5 you have brand; people know who you are and trust you.”

If nothing else, companies should instruct some members of their marketing team to research how a chain-based, disintermediated system may affect the company’s industry, Epstein says. Ask and answer questions like: “What does blockchain do to the competitive landscape of our industry?” and “Where are we acting as a third-party intermediary? Where are our competitors?”

For marketers who prefer to wait and watch, Morgan says to pay attention to how changes in blockchain technology will affect key areas of marketing, such as identity verification and management. “Our use of blockchain is really mapping out our longer-term software architectures and business models, understanding that blockchain is going to have really significant disruptive effects on this ecosystem,” he says of his own business. 

Marketers who choose to remain incurious about blockchain technology surely exist, but Epstein compares this technology to a “massive wave” that will crash down on businesses whether they’re ready or not. 

“The genie is out of the bottle,” Epstein says. “You can do what you want with the information, but don’t tell me you didn’t know it was coming.” â€‹

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Each new school year, the same boastful platitude rings out across American universities: “The largest class ever!” The campus clichĂ© may be warranted. In fall 2017, , per the National Center for Education Statistics, which is equivalent to 6.2% of the American population. This was an increase of 5.1 million students from the fall of 2000.

However, the safety in numbers and clichĂ©s may be in danger. Public and private high school class sizes are stagnating, leaving university enrollment poised to drop. 

Amir Rasool, managing content director of higher education at Hanover Research, says enrollment numbers are predicted to be flat or decreasing over the next 15 years, save for an uptick in 2023. And universities can’t only worry about the future: Estimates from Research Center show that enrollment was down 1.5% from spring 2016 to spring 2017 at U.S. institutions. When pulling back to 2015, nationwide enrollment is down 2.9%—a loss of more than 500,000 students.   

“We typically find that when the economy is faring poorly, enrollments go up,” Rasool says. “We saw this most recently in response to the 2008 recession. Conversely, when the economy is thriving and jobs are more plentiful, enrollments tend to fall.”

Each region will feel the enrollment drop differently as student populations change, Rasool says. For example, the Northeast and Midwest will likely see drops in enrollment, while the South and West may see increases. The Northeast, he says, may be most affected because of its greater concentration of higher-education institutions and a projected drop in student population. National predictions don’t tell the whole story; each university needs to do its own math on how to fill seats. 

How universities will solve that math will differ by institution. Hanover Research’s 2017 Industry Trend Report for Higher Education found that universities will attempt to redress the enrollment problem through tuition fee review and discounting, reviewing the university’s portfolio and recruiting out-of-state students. That third option appears to be the de facto formula for many universities.  

Schools winning over out-of-state students is a popular option because it’s the easiest way to address the enrollment—and therefore revenue—crisis. Each year students pay billions of dollars in tuition, and universities can’t afford to lose that revenue, especially as threats of diminished education funding loom at both state and federal levels. If tuition isn’t the raison d’ĂȘtre of a university’s business, it’s close. 

David Burge, George Mason University’s vice president for enrollment management, says private universities have regarded enrollment numbers as dollar signs for years, but the notion is a recent revelation—perhaps 10 to 15 years old—for public institutions. Winning new students is now “core to the work” of all universities, Burge says. 

This renewed focus on enrollment falls heavily on the shoulders of university advertising and marketing departments. The proof is in the ballooning budgets: A report from Educational Marketing Group and Kantar Media found that advertising spending at universities grew 22% from 2013 to 2016. However, as Rob Zinkan, associate vice president of marketing at Indiana University, wrote in a piece for Inside Higher Ed, . 

Instead of using blunt-force spending, university marketers must use guile, creativity and a bevy of marketing tools. Here’s what some successful university marketers have done to keep enrollment high. 

Know Your Geography

Before marketers reach out to students on the other side of the country, universities should be sure they have a need unmet in their own backyard. For example, Zinkan is still able to comfortably lean on bromides, saying that Indiana University Bloomington has a “record-setting class” of incoming students, 70% of whom are from Indiana. While this doesn’t mean Indiana can stop worrying about its enrollment rates, Zinkan says the numbers have allowed the university to divvy up its marketing budget “fairly evenly” between in-state and out-of-state students.

Despite the national trends, George Mason’s Burge says his university has seen an uptick of high school graduates in parts of Virginia. However, the university is forecasting a “substantial decline” of students within 10 to 15 years. This decline shows why each university must understand its own market, Burge says, as a local enrollment rate may be high this year and desiccated the next. 

Data and Measurement 

The University of Alabama is one of the success stories of out-of-state student recruiting. In the past decade, Alabama’s attention to data seems to have paid off: In fall 2006, 15,761 students applied to Alabama; in fall 2017, there were 43,693 applications, a 177.2% increase. Approximately 5,000 students from this year’s freshmen class of 7,407 were from outside of Alabama, says Linda Bonnin, vice president of the University of Alabama’s Division of Strategic Communications, who joined Alabama in 2015.

 Data and measurement have played big roles, Bonnin says. ÂÜÀòÉçčÙÍűt 15 years ago, Alabama executives noticed a decreasing number of in-state students and started digging into the data. What the school found was clear: If the school was to create a sustainable model, officials needed to aggressively recruit out-of-state students.   

“We know exactly how we can drill down to high schools and determine what the plausibility is of students from that high school choosing the University of Alabama,” Bonnin says. “It can get quite specific in the data. And to me, that’s what’s exciting. It’s not a guessing game. You can determine that you know the viability of being successful with a particular market.”

At George Mason University, Burge says data and segmentation have played a similar role in building “the largest freshman class” ever this year. Approximately a quarter of the new class, 753 students, were from outside of Virginia in 2017, up from 626 out-of-state students in 2013. 

“We expanded our marketing operational capacity to allow us to segment communications and we thought critically about how we identify students in the college selection process,” Burge says. Data is especially important for George Mason, as the school has a growth aspiration of 100,000 career-ready graduates over a 10-year-period. Burge says the school uses metrics to review potential student conversion from lead to application, application to admission offer and admission offer to attendance. 

“We begin each year with very specific targets of new student enrollment, which we have arrived at through a backwards calculation of the number of graduates that we want to achieve over time,” Burge says. “We then break that down by market.”

By this point, Burge’s team can figure out which students should come from Virginia and how many students need to be recruited elsewhere. 

Arriving in the Digital Age 

Before Bonnin arrived at the University of Alabama in 2015, the school was “not in the digital age.” This had to change, she says, as digital marketing is essential to win over the generation aptly referred to by some as the iGeneration. “They have everything in the palm of their hand, so the more you can put in the palm of their hand the better,” she says.

Now, Alabama has joined the digital age, and digital marketing is the most impactful piece of Alabama’s marketing plan, giving the school a tool that is both effective and inexpensive, Bonnin says. Alabama has tried social media ads, geotargeting, retargeting, rooftop targeting, geofencing and “every other kind of targeting you can think of,” Bonnin says. These tools can track ROI to show universities what is working and what to scrap.  

“You can adjust it as you need to, based on what you’re learning from the metrics,” Bonnin says. 

Adding a Personal Touch

No matter how important digital marketing is, students won’t be won over by e-mail and retargeting alone. A personal touch is needed, Bonnin says, and Alabama reaches out with receptions held across the country. These personal touches need to be “50-50” with digital marketing, she says, lest the digital effort be wasted.  

The personal touch has become nearly inseparable from digital marketing; Bonnin says Alabama recruiting events surge in attendance—anywhere from 30% to 200%—when they’re bolstered by targeted digital marketing. 

Recruiters Across the Country

Just as Alabama’s football coaches recruit the best athletes from across the country, the university’s enrollment and marketing departments recruit the best academic students from across the country. Like many U.S. universities, Alabama has recruiters stationed in multiple states. Their job: convince America’s brightest students to come to campus for a tour.

“We have a very organized, strategic and focused effort to recruit out-of-state students,” Bonnin says. “This is from the top-down, all the way to recruiters on the ground. Everybody on our campus recognizes the importance of recruiting students. We don’t want to lose one single student to another university, so all our efforts reflect that commitment to recruitment. We go after the best students in every market.”

Bonnin won’t comment on how many recruiters the university employs, but says they’re in every U.S. state, with multiple recruiters in Alabama. Each recruiter has a set number of students they’re expected to recruit, with the data-determined goals varying across the country. 

George Mason’s recruiting arm isn’t on the same scale as Alabama, Burge says, but the university does place recruiters in regions of the country where they’ve found potential for enrollment growth, including Texas, California and the Southeast region. 

Although recruiting works for George Mason, Burge says it must be done alongside other key investments to successfully develop a new market. University officials must ask themselves questions such as, “Are we buying ACT and SAT names in greater numbers from this area?” and “Am I investing in the right messaging?” to have a successful recruiting program. Plunking a recruiter with vague goals into the middle of America reduces a program’s chance of success. 

There can be a downside to out-of-state recruitment. “Some state institutions are experiencing a negative public reaction from in-state students and their families,” says Rasool. “These groups feel that their tax dollars are helping to fund in-state universities, and therefore they (or their children) should get priority admission. Additionally, some states (North Carolina, for example) have laws capping the number of out-of-state students a public university can admit, and institutions risk losing state funding if they exceed that number.”

Having a Consistent Message

The digital marketing, the data research, the recruiters—all go to waste without a consistent, central message. 

“It’s essential,” says Burge, who adds that his position—vice president for enrollment management—was created to work toward better recruiting and a unified message. “You need to have a smart and thoughtful process to develop the right lead marketing messages,” Burge says. 

Put differently: Your talking points can be amazing, but they won’t do anything if they aren’t thoughtfully crafted for each market. Good, unique messages must be delivered to different markets, but the messages must be on brand. “Both have to be in place for success,” Burge says of good messages and good strategy. “You can’t be successful without them. Period.”

Word of Mouth and Authentic Branding

States like Alabama, Virginia and Indiana may not sound like magnets for young people, but branding and word of mouth can do yeoman’s work in spreading a university’s message. For example, many Alabama students come from the Northeast and the West Coast, Bonnin says, two regions rife with prestigious universities. No matter; Alabama students, alumni and parents move back to these regions and hype potential students with stories of their college glory days. “It just begins to spread,” Bonnin says. 

Word of mouth comes easily to universities that are authentic in their messaging and actions. Whether students visit for a campus tour or consider enrolling in classes, their impression of the university must match the messages preached during the marketing campaign. 

“You shouldn’t go into a market trying to be something that you’re not, changing your message from place to place,” Bonnin says. “Just own who you are. Make everything that you do authentic.”

George Mason doesn’t have the same coast-to-coast name recognition as Alabama; the farther potential students live from George Mason’s Virginia campus, the harder it becomes to deliver the brand’s message. George Mason’s staff must work harder to get a potential student’s attention, keep their attention and inspire them to apply and enroll. 

Less-recognizable schools must take an authentic assessment of themselves to create branding that draws students’ attention, Burge says. In George Mason’s case, this may be reminding potential students from California or Texas about the university’s proximity to Washington, D.C. 

“We remind them [by saying], ‘Here’s how that proximity improves your college experience,” Burge says. “Each institution [needs to] have something like that.”

Bright Lights, Big Reach

Alabama’s football team has given alumni and students plenty of reason to yell “Roll Tide”—the school’s rallying cry—as the team has rarely lost a game over the past few years. Bonnin is right there yelling with them, as Alabama’s athletic success has helped her spread the university’s message. In December 2015, for example, Alabama was playing against Michigan State in the Cotton Bowl, giving Bonnin a chance to demonstrate the power of digital.

“The excitement was peaking and the football team was there for the game, so we went into both markets with a strong digital presence,” she says. “We began to carry our messages to prospective high school students and their parents. It was really effective for us.”

While sports can mesmerize prospective students, Bonnin says athletics should only be a piece of the wooing process. “It gets a lot of attention at certain times of the year, but we also want them to understand the academic quality of the institution,” Bonnin says. “That’s a message that we drive pretty consistently across the country.”

Even so, the hollering of University of Alabama’s rallying cry is likely a draw for students across America who see the excitable crowds, convivial atmosphere and thrilling games. More than 25 million viewers watched the Alabama Crimson Tide defeat the Clemson Tigers in the 2016 National Championship game. You can’t buy that kind of reach.  

Remember Your Mission

Universities can recruit new students from across America to bolster their enrollment numbers, but Burge says university officials must remember their school’s core mission and values. 

For example, two of George Mason’s core values are diversity and accessibility, which Burge says dovetail with producing great outcomes for graduates. This means George Mason officials look for “the right applicants 
 for the long-term growth of the institution” as it pertains to the university’s mission. 

“I counsel anybody engaged in this work to think critically about who they are and who they set up camp with to help them achieve this goal,” Burge says. “And to remain true to their mission.”

Part of George Mason’s mission is targeting the neediest students—especially from Virginia—and offering them merit scholarships. When the scholarships aren’t available, Burge says there’s an ethical question of whether a student can afford a four-year degree, which is $34,370 per year for out-of-state students as of 2017-2018. Telling students the truth about money is important, so students don’t feel like they’ve been bamboozled, Burge says.  

—to “advance the intellectual and social condition of the people of the state, the nation and the world through the creation, translation and dissemination of knowledge”—also shines a light on how the bulk of the school’s scholarships and discounted tuition are allotted: to students with high academic achievement. Bonnin says more than 40% of this year’s freshman class scored 30 or higher on their ACT (on a scale of 36). In addition, 30.8% of this year’s freshman were in the top 10% of their graduating high school class.

“We definitely want the best and brightest students here because they have better chances of being successful,” Bonnin says. 

Celebrations are Temporary

University marketers can celebrate, but they can’t forget the work ahead, Burge says. He and his team had a temporary celebration after learning this year’s incoming class was the school’s largest ever, but he says no marketing professionals can rest on their prior successes. 

“Last year, I gathered everybody together and we celebrated the numbers,” Burge says. “I said, ‘We should all feel really good about what you did. Now let’s go do it again.’ That’s the nature of enrollment. It has a very clear beginning and end.” â€‹

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