They’re sort of the last Industrial Age companies, doing digital things, in the industrial model. When we start to see businesses go private, when they start to buy themselves back from their shareholders because they no longer want to be just so subjected to the weight of money, you’ll start to see some interesting things happening.
Brendan: Another example from the book, you cite The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS), how they ran into trouble in the mid-1990s in their theme parks especially. Michael Eisner asked the CFO to come in and try to turn that around, and it’s something you called “living in RAM” is how they went about it. Could you talk about that, and what that means for The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS)?
Douglas: There’s one way for Disney to make money, and the way they were looking to do it in the late ’80s and early ’90s was by selling off their historical assets on a certain level, or selling them out. “Oh, here’s Mickey again.” “Here’s Cinderella.” “Here’s Sleeping Beauty,” and throwing their old products out there as much as possible.
They were, in some sense, emptying the vault and spreading thin their old stuff, their legacy, all that. The parks started to suffer, actually, as a result of that. The parks started to decay, and they just weren’t as interesting to people.
What they decided to do was to reverse what they were doing. Instead of looking at their value as being their vault of mythology, they started looking at their value as their front-line employees. They reversed, really, the dynamic of the company.
They saw management as, management’s only job is to serve the front-line employees, and the front-line employees are the ones who are going to understand what the customers actually want, what’s actually happening here. All the innovation really came from there, back.
It was an interesting model to use, because rather than being a historically based company, they became a real-time based company, that was based in what we now call customer experience, or brand experience, but is the lived, real-time experience of the customers.
Brendan: Another example of living in the now, you talked about it in the book, is social media and a social media strategy. Pretty much every big company has to have some.
In the book, you talk about how General Motors Company (NYSE:GM) made an error with their SUV. They had people come in and make commercials for them they could upload to the Internet. What happened was the big gas guzzler ones got voted to the top of the favorites list.
You’ve seen McDonald’s Corporation (NYSE:MCD) have some social media problems when they had the hashtag problem. They got mostly complaints via their promoted hashtag thing on Twitter. Is that just something companies have to accept with social media, or is there a way that they can have it both ways, in the sense that it could be a good thing as well?
Douglas: It can be a good thing. The problem most companies are still making is they don’t understand that social media is a nonfiction media. Whether the things you socially tweet are true or not, they’re still truth-based. They’re rumors. They’re facts.
Brand mythologies don’t function in a social media space, so what they’re trying to do too often is communicate their brand values, rather than their product values; their mythological ideas, rather than what’s going on in the company.
People are not going to want to tweet about the Keebler Elves, that they’re baking these cookies in a hollow tree. They are going to want to tweet, “Where do these Keebler cookies actually come from? Who makes them? Are they organic ingredients? Are they high cholesterol or low? Are there slaves being used to make them, or are the workers being treated well?”
Where branding and brand mythologies used to exist to really distance consumers from what was going on at the factory, social media reconnects them to what’s going on in your production chain. The way to have a successful social media campaign, so to speak, is not to think of it as a brand campaign, but as a company campaign.
