‘Don’t Do. Be.’ … I Don’t Get It

With a title like “Don’t Do. Be.” I was intrigued enough to get a back-of-the-room seat to hear Ray Podder of a company called Grow do his thing. Most everyone else was flooding over into “What Blogs Are Teaching Us About the New Rules of Marketing” session next door. I should have gone with the herd.

What I got out of “Don’t Do. Be” I don’t get. It was a strategic branding session for no particular brand, and a presentation so full of esoterica that I didn’t know if I was at ad:tech or that Friday 8:30 a.m. anthropology lecture that I never seemed to be able to sit through.

Of course, Mr. Podder is a brilliant thinker. His ideas are spot on, albeit masked in a plethora of charts, venn diagrams and graphical models not found on any PowerPoint menu. When he started talking about the compression of time, he totally lost me. But that may be an indication of my own inability to grasp big ‘ole juicy concepts and koans like:

-- Meaning is relevant to context and context is shifting.
-- No one is as smart as anyone.
-- Awareness may not create relevance, but relevance can make connections
-- Ideas and connections are all over the place. This creates a compression of time.
-- When there are fewer connections, there are fewer variables in the marketplace.

Well, the session write up did ask if the audience was “ready to learn about bionomic theories and the three key principles of being?” Damn, I hate it when I’m not smart enough to understand something!

If I knew anything about bionomic theories and how they apply to brands (this is a strategic branding session, afterall), then I would probably come around to understanding what Podder means. That brands are totally organic, and brand managers don’t know a goddamned thing about them or their customers. That consumers are looking for great brands, they are looking for great experiences, and at the end of the day, they just want simple satisfaction and relevance to come with it. That brands have for decades stopped innovating—truly innovating—in order to stay relevant and resonant with consumers. That everyone has a story, and they way we as marketers fit within those stories is at the heart of marketing in the near future.

Oh wait, maybe I did get something out of it.