“One size fits all” in current marketing, politics, and enterprise software
(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Loading ... 
You may ask what these three things have in common? The way they utilize industrial age wisdom and methods to post-industrial society, the concept of economies of scale and universality. It is interesting to note that all these characteristics are also associated with scarcity of capital or energy or resources, concepts of economy of scale and central control of business process.
Let’s look at marketing where slicing and dicing of demographical data is a main staple, with underlying assumptions that specific groups of people, they identified, behave the same way and desire similar things. They also assume that marketing resources are scarce, which cause marketers to design products that suppose to be universally attractive to large constituency of consumers. They also create mass advertising campaigns that potential consumers use to leave TV for snack breaks or skip using technology like Tivo or DVR.
Politics is a very similar business to marketing, except truth in advertising rules are much more relaxed and you don’t really have to deliver any product you sold. The tools and methods of grouping people into imaginary blocks are also too familiar - with the soccer moms, nascar dads, Latino votes, etc. There are some weak attempts to correlate these groups to specific issues, but no serious interest and subsequently understanding that each human being has their own specific reason to vote they way they do. I am not suggesting that we vote or buy as a result of rational reasoning, just that we have our irrational reasons that are not associated with their marketing definitions.
Enterprise Software, pre-build libraries of business applications, which were designed to support automation of repetitive business tasks and processes, brought phenomenal efficiencies into traditional business of manufacturing and distribution of physical goods. However it’s value becomes rather questionable when attempts are made to use the same approach in automation of processes which support creative, “one of” tasks and activities which are highly specific not to a group, or a team, but to every individual, and highly fluid. That explains many well documented disappointments of adoption SFA software, as an example, and requires a different approach to adoption management.
Given that we already automated most of the repetitive, industrial age processes, and will spend more of our time doing “one off” activities, will become more involved into political process focusing on important to us as individuals issues, and buying based on personal recommendations of people like us, the software manufacturers, political strategists and marketers need to take notice or become obsolete as a steam engine.
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.